It was “the” drug of Bashar al-Assad’s regime: captagon, a stimulant produced on an industrial scale for years in Syria and which flooded the Middle East. The country’s new authorities announced on Wednesday, December 25, that they had destroyed one million captagon pills. The former rebels intend to show their credentials.
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The ex-rebels, now in charge in Syriahave the art of staging. They invited the press to the Kafar Soussé district, in the heart of the former ultra-secure zone of Damascus, to witness the destruction of drug stocks.
In front of the cameras, cannabis, tramadol and a million captagon pills – according to these fighters – are doused with gasoline before being burned, under a poster of Bashar al-Assad. The deposed president on the run in Russia had made his country a narco-state. Captagon was manufactured by the regime and sold in Iraq or Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia.
The new masters of Syria, for their part, claim to want “ protect » the drug population. Since they took power in early December, other stocks have been destroyed elsewhere in the country, including alcohol reserves.
In search of respectability, among the population but also internationally, the main leader of the rebel coalition, Ahmad al-Chareh, promised to eradicate the trafficking which filled the coffers of the old regime.
Also readCaptagon: the Syrian sector