Global News Podcast - The Global Story: Syria's illegal drug empire

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Ousted President Bashar al-Assad has been linked to Syria’s multi-billion dollar Captagon trade. Rebel leaders vow to end it—but what will it take to break the country's link to the drug?

Hello, this is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritzen with your weekly bonus from the Global Story, which brings you a single story with depth and insight from the BBC's best journalists. There's a new episode every weekday. Just search for the Global Story wherever you get your pods and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. Here's my colleague, Katrina Perry. Since overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, Syria's new rebel leader has promised a bright future. Stability, tolerance and religious diversity. Ahmad al-Sharah has also vowed to end the criminal drugs empire linked to the Assad family, a multi-billion dollar operation that spread a drug called Captagon throughout the Middle East.

Syria has become the biggest producer of Captagon on Earth, and today Syria is going to be purified by the grace of God. So what will it take for Syria's new leaders to stamp out an industry so intertwined with the state? And what does it mean for the future of Syria and Syrians as they adjust to life without Assad? Well, to talk about all of this, we're joined today from Jerusalem by Amir Nader, a BBC

international correspondent who has been covering the drugs trade in the Middle East. Amir, great to have you with us today. Thank you. It's great to talk with you. So let's start with the very basics here. What is Captegon? Well, it's not really known that much outside of the Middle East, but Captegon is a drug. It's a pill. We've really seen it flooding the Middle East in the past 10 years or so, places like

Saudi Arabia where it's found a really big lucrative market. It was originally manufactured in Germany in the 1960s as a treatment for ADHD but we've been seeing it start to be used more recreationally in the Middle East in the past few years. It's an amphetamine-like stimulant when you don't have ADHD, it gives that effect and it allows you to socialize all night with friends or party. We've been seeing it also used by manual laborers who might want to drive a truck all night through the desert or you know work on a building site throughout the night.

And Amir, in the course of your reporting you've spoken to some people who have been taking this drug. What do they say about the effects of taking it long term? It is highly addictive and can lead to a dependency on it in some people and can cause effects such as hallucination or Real sort of negative effects on people's mental state when they start to consume lots of it I Was 19 when I started taking cap to gone my life started falling apart

We filmed at a rehabilitation center in the capital of Jordan, Amman, and there we met a young man called Yasser who was really struggling with his dependency on Captegan. You live without food, so the body is a wreck. My weight dropped to 53 kilos. I'm married, I have a family. I don't want to continue because I My weight dropped to 53 kilos. I'm married. I have a family. I don't want to continue because I don't want to lose them. I don't want to lose myself.

What led you to start looking into the Syrian government's ties to the Capitagon trade? We weren't the first people to allege that the Syrian government was involved in this trade. But we'd noticed there was a lot of allegations swirling around, a lot of conjecture that at the scale it was being made and shipped around the Middle East that the regime must have some kind of interest in it because how else could you know millions of these pills be found and discovered in shipments in countries all around the region produced at such vast quantities. So in 2022 we set out to make a documentary for BBC I to find the strongest evidence we could. You know, was the Syrian regime involved in this or not?

And what did you find about the Assad family involvement in this trade? Well we were investigating for about a year and in the process of us chasing leads, speaking to Syrian regime soldiers, one particular branch of the Syrian armed forces kept coming up and this is the 4th Armoured Division, which is known, was known as an elite branch of the Syrian armed Forces and headed by none other than the brother of former president Bashar al-Assad called Meher al-Assad and this was already a very notorious military unit it was accused of some of the worst instances of violence on protesters during the Syrian uprising

during the Syrian uprising. Meher Elasset himself has been sanctioned by a number of countries and accused of using chemical weapons on protesters. They are the pictures that will haunt the world for years. A suspected mass chemical attack marks a new low in Syria's civil war that's already cost the lives of over 100,000 people. And this 4th Armoured Division kept coming up time and time again, but there's just two crucial court cases, one of which was a case in Germany where a shipment of 40 million dollars worth of Captegon was seized and wiretaps revealed that the men who were being pursued by German authorities were

communicating with and boasting about their relationship with the 4th Division. They indeed testified during the court case that for every shipment they sent from Syria of Captegon they had to pay the 4th division $250,000. But perhaps the biggest revelation came in our investigation through a court case in Lebanon where a shipment of 100 million pills was apprehended in Malaysia and the source of this shipment, the man responsible for it, was a Captegon king who was in Lebanon. This just shows you how international this trade had become. We were able to establish that one of the key contexts that he was discussing the Captegon trade with,

comings and goings, money, happened to be none other than a general in charge of the 4th Division, the right-hand man to Assad's brother. And was that 4th Division facilitating the movement of the drugs right through the Middle East or just on the Syria part of things? As far as we understand they were involved in the production and packaging and the smuggling of these pills in industrial equipment which when it's opened up by inspectors in a port in Italy or Malaysia or wherever it looks inconspicuous it looks like this is just a pallet of wheels. We understood that the fourth division was playing a role in that packaging in the hiding of the drugs and since we've seen

the regime fall we've been very pleased to see in fact many warehouses that are being reported to have belonged to the 4th Division. That process was indeed taking place in those warehouses where there was pill pressing machines, industrial goods in various stages of having pills hidden inside them. So it seems like the fourth division was involved at all stages of this process, from the production, indeed to the exportation. However, going outside of Syria, there was a sort of extended criminal network involved in the delivery and distribution of the drugs in Saudi Arabia, in the other countries in

the Middle East, where there was the end consumer. And you mentioned Amir there, some of the Syrian soldiers who were in that catagon trade. What did they say to you about being involved in this operation? Well, with the kind of money involved and how lucrative this trade is, you'd think that all the rank-and-file soldiers would be rolling in it and that perhaps their superiors would be handing out money to those below them and their juniors. It doesn't in fact seem like that. So after spending a lot of time preparing and building the trust

of a soldier who was serving in the Syrian army, we managed to organise an interview inside regime held Syria organised remotely with a journalist who worked for us on the ground. And this soldier gave us actually quite a, I think, representative account of what life is like for a rank-and-file soldier in the Syrian army. My pay is 150,000 lira, almost 30 dollars or 25 to 30 dollars. This barely lasts three days for somebody with two or three children. So we become dealers.

That lack of money coming in, the lack of payment by the Syrian army was pushing many of his comrades and him into crime essentially and into the Cap-to-Gone trade. He said that they would go to the 4th Division and work with them to move drugs through the country. The army's 4th Division facilitates our movement. If there was a traffic jam, they would clear it. The primary persons responsible for the drugs manufacturing and trade are Bashar al-Assad and his brother, Maher al-Assad. The money goes straight into their pockets. It goes to show how endemic it was throughout the Syrian armed forces and how everyone really knew on the inside who was in charge, who was directing this trade.

And given the scale of the operation as your reporting has uncovered there, do we know how much money the Assad's made from Cap to Gone? A former US Middle East envoy who was serving under the previous Trump administration told me he thought the revenues of Cap to Gone dwarfed the Syrian state budget. The World Bank made an attempt to put a figure on how much this trade is worth and they arrived at 5.6 billion dollars a year of which they thought around 2 billion dollars was going back upstream to Syria. Now I don't think from our understanding of the way Syria was being managed that was necessarily being distributed into public services in Syria. It seemed very much like this was going primarily into the pockets of the inner

circle of President Assad and his sort of extended cronies and security figures tied to the regime. And let's talk a bit more about what that money was used for, because as you alluded to there, Bashar al-Assad waged a brutal war on his own people for more than a decade. But you don't think that was funded by any of the money from the Capitoline trade? I think it's hard to say. I mean, in the history of the Syrian civil war, it seems that the most pivotal moments were when Russia and indeed Iran came to the salvation of President Bashar al-Assad

and helped prop him up with airstrikes and weapons and military support. From my understanding, from my investigation into the Cap-to-Gone trade, it feels like most of the money generated by this very lucrative criminal enterprise was going for the personal profit and personal gain of the Assad extended family rather than the Syrian economy or the Syrian war machine necessarily and as we've heard from that Syrian soldier they were engaged in their own sort of low-level version of the Cap to Gone trade where they were buying bags here and there, kilograms here and there, which they were selling inside

the country. Whereas the big profits, the big shipments were being overseen by those high leveled sorts of top brass military figures. Now, we've spoken a lot about Syria in recent weeks, of course, since the toppling of Bashar al-Assad, but just remind listeners, Amir, of the civil war, the human rights abuses that were going on under Assad's regime all the while, while he had a bountiful wealth available to him personally and his family. It's obviously a difficult period that Syria has gone through since the outbreak of the civil war after the Arab Spring. We saw Syrians taking to the streets

to demand for democracy in the face of a brutal crackdown Extraordinary scenes as tanks rumbled down the streets of Daraa trying to seize the city back from protesters The army moved in in force, firing at demonstrators. But what I would say is that this Capitagon trade, while it might seem somehow peripheral to the story of the Syrian revolution, actually I think it speaks volumes about just the whole revolution itself because when we saw this lightning military advance by the rebels in the past weeks taking over the regime held cities in you know a matter of days and seeing the Syrian soldiers the regime soldiers you know

run off into the night there's sort of total collapse of the moral spirit and the morale of the Syrian regime soldiers I think it just shows you how hollowed out the state had become, the military had become. You know, it was so embedded in the criminal enterprise, soldiers paid barely enough money to feed their family for three days. This military had become a vehicle for personal wealth and personal enrichment for those at the top. And indeed, we can see that the state has as well. So I think looking through the lens of Captegon, it gives you a good understanding of just

how corrupt and hollowed out and brittle the Syrian state had become. And gives us some explanation of just how quickly, how could this regime fall apart in just a matter of days? Well, we've looked at the drug smuggling operation tied to former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Next, we'll find out what Syria's new leaders are doing to stop it and what that means for the future of Syria. This is the Global Story. We bring you one big international story in detail five days a week. Follow or subscribe wherever you listen. With me is BBC International correspondent Amir Nader. Amir, if the Cap-to-Gone trade in Syria was being controlled by the Assad regime,

what happened to all those drugs and that network of drugs smuggling when Assad was overthrown? Well, it's been absolutely incredible to see all the videos emerging from Syria since Assad was overthrown and fled the country. All those allegations we made, the conclusions we arrived at through our investigation that the army was so deeply embedded in this criminal trade, to see Syrians going in, busting open military factories, warehouses, finding Cap-to-gon machines, finding bags and bags of thousands, hundreds of thousands of CaptaGon pills was a huge vindication of our journalism.

So just by the fact that this new rebel government has dismantled the old Syrian army, the regime, that has done a huge amount to disrupt the trade and I've heard that from various sources already around the region that they've already noticed a huge drop in the amount of Captagon being exported and indeed arriving around the Middle East. We can say the kingpins have gone with that dismantling of the Syrian army but we are still seeing that the new government, the sort of coalition of various militias that were involved in overthrowing the Syrian regime, that there's now this attempt to form a unified state, a unified army. This new government isn't yet fully in control of the country. In the south of Syria, where we saw much smuggling of Captacom by land into Jordan. There is ongoing clashes

there with sort of various groups, old warlords, criminal gangs, and you know there is chaos and there is a vacuum in certain parts of the country where such a lucrative trade, those criminal gangs could indeed exploit that vacuum. The security situation in Syria isn't settled and I think you know a failure of the government to be able to control those pockets of the country where there is this chaos could allow new criminal gangs to step into the void. And what about the money? I mean this was a massive flow of cash coming into Syria.

If that dries up what does that mean for Syrians? It's interesting because the new president of Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharah, who was the leader of the HTS rebels who led the overthrowing of President Assad, he's put a real big emphasis on trying to get the international sanctions lifted on Syria. He wants to restart this economy which was broken by over 10 years of civil war. I think the profit of the Cap-to-Gone trade was not being distributed to the average Syrian. The focus now is, I think, perhaps we could say on the new government trying to present a squeaky clean image to the international community.

I think they understand the value of going to the region, to the Gulf states, to Jordan and saying, work with us, help us, we intend to stop the drug smuggling out of our country. When the new foreign minister of Syria went to Jordan just a few days ago in the capital, he said just that, we will stop the drug smuggling out of Syria. And I think that's the international image that the new government is trying to project. Internally, I think the government also understands the value of trying to say we're going to reassert the moral fibre, the moral integrity of Syria after it becoming so hollowed out

by the previous government who'd become enmeshed in a criminal enterprise. The HTS government is trying to assert its piety to some extent, you know, in the sense of we're not going to be a country which is basing some of our income and our revenues on a drug-based criminal enterprise. And you mentioned Jordan. I mean, Jordan was just so angry with the drugs trade along that border that you mentioned earlier and the pressure that it was putting on its soldiers. You were speaking to some of them as well. We embedded with the Jordanian armed forces and we went up onto the Jordanian border with Syria.

We spoke with those Jordanian soldiers. There are a lot of these individuals. They're smugglers heading towards our side. Some of whom had lost their comrades fighting Cap-to-Gon smugglers in shootouts with those smugglers coming across the border from Syria. The Rapid Response Patrol moves towards them, ready to carry out the army's new rules of engagement. They fire directly at them, forcing them to retreat. They're crawling for their lives.

This is a lesson for them and others so they never come back to our country. These are the more lower level smugglers carrying a few thousand by back or on the back of a pickup truck. These aren't the great big shipments of thousands of pills and those smugglers are often carrying weapons, often engaging the Jordanian armed forces in shootouts as they try to cross into Jordan. The first time that we went up to the border it was not much more than a trench and barbed wire and then we returned around six months later and we found heavily armed, armoured

personal carriers, kind of big tanky looking vehicles, much more fortified stretchers of the border. Jordan had, you could say, been pushed into a drug war, an arco war with Syria and many other countries around the region were just as disturbed by the trade. Saudi Arabia for a while halted the import of fruit and vegetables from Lebanon because so often drugs going via Lebanon from Syria were packed into pomegranates and being discovered by the ship load in Saudi Arabia. So this trade was a problem that the region was so focused on that even Assad began to understand its political leverage. And we saw just before he fell, perhaps one of

the reasons why his falling was so surprising was because he'd begun to be rehabilitated into the Middle East and into the international community'd begun to be rehabilitated into the Middle East and into the international community. He'd been rehabilitated into the Arab League after years of being expelled during the Civil War. And one of the promises he gave and why he was allowed back into the Arab League was because he promised to crack down on the Cap-to-Gon trade, the Cap-to-Gon trade that he was, you know, overseeing to some extent via his extended family, right? He understood that it was a trade that he could use for political leverage and to use as a way back in to the international community.

So Al-Sharah is using this end to the Captegon drugs trade to curry favour in the Middle East. What about his relationship with the rest of the drugs trade to curry favour in the Middle East. What about his relationship with the rest of the world, though? I mean, the UN Special Envoy, Gair Paterson, has made it clear that the international community is willing to work with Syria's new government, but it's going to hold it to a high standard. Syrians and the international community need to get the next phase right. Syrians and the international community need to get the next phase right. And the UN stands ready to do everything we can to facilitate, to help and to support. There are tremendous opportunities for building a foundation for lasting peace and stability in Syria.

But missed steps and missed opportunities could pose risks to Syria's future and plant seeds of instability. I think the new government is very keen to assert a new brand for Syria and a new brand indeed for themselves and one that is based on an image which is somehow a balance between their own political, perhaps religious leanings and also one which understands the value of law and order, of pluralism in the country, of respecting minority rights. And it understands that if it sends the right messages, not only internally but internationally, that the big blockages on the Syrian economy, which came after years of the country being ostracised and marginalised and kicked out of the international community and becoming blacklisted, they understand

that they are a new government that stands up to drug smuggling and indeed protects the rights of all of those different groups I've just mentioned, that the sanctions which are heavily throttling the economy could be lifted. They could be able to access the fuel that they desperately need, the international aid which they desperately need, and which all of those countries internationally are open to giving to Syria, but they couldn't do so previously because it was so politically toxic to deal with the Assad regime. And indeed, you know, many countries, including Turkey, Germany, many countries in Europe, I think are keen to find a way to support the new Syrian regime

because they also understand that they have many Syrian refugees in those countries and they are wanting to support and give a new Syria a chance. And so that's what the new regime understands that if we are cracking down on the drugs trade, that's one key element of this new Syria, which they are trying to project. How do you think all of this is being received by the Syrian people themselves? I mean, do they welcome this commitment to fighting the drug trade? I mean, do they welcome this commitment to fighting the drug trade? For the Syrian people, I think, you know, they heard about allegations. Many people read or saw the investigations, including our own looking into the CaptaGon

trade. But for them, it was again, also a real moment of realization just how embedded the old regime was in this drugs trade. I mean, can you believe that a great nation of civilization in history, such as Syria, had been turned into an anarcho state? And I think with them now looking at the new regime, they have the same mixture of joy and apprehension about what the future might hold, how this new government might conduct itself, will it live up to the promises it's making.

But, you know, the Syrian people are reading and receiving those signals well. It's an indescribable feeling. We're so happy. After all the years of dictatorship we've lived through, we won because of our men and our fighters, and now we're at the moment that we're going to build the greatest Syria. Who doesn't want their country to be cleansed, purified of being a narco state? Is there any justification for having your army involved in an international drugs enterprise? I think people respect the attempt by the new government to say, we intend to restore

the moral fibre and the moral integrity of the country after it had been so completely hollowed out by the old regime. Well, Amir, thank you so much for your reporting on this and thanks for sharing it with us on The Global Story. And I'll just say for listeners that the film that you mentioned earlier, Syria Addicted to Cactagon, is available to watch if anyone wants to on YouTube and on the BBC iPlayer. It is well worth watching. Thanks so much, Amir. Thank you so much. And as always, thanks so much to you for listening.

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