How the Assad regime made billions from the production and export of party drugs

Leila Molana-Allen:

Damascus, the epicenter of Bashar al-Assad’s control network. Now the carefully guarded secrets of his regime are being revealed.

We drive into the mountains on the outskirts of Damascus and head for a large Captagon facility that rebel fighters discovered when they took the city.

If we pulled up to an inconspicuous warehouse, you would never guess that it was the lifeblood of an organized crime network. The only sign that something is wrong here are the rebel fighters stationed outside and the empty bullet casings strewn across the parking lot. A fighter leads us into the darkness.

We’re in a cavernous basement of a former food factory, and as you walk in, suddenly there are pallets full of Captagon in front of you, packaged and ready to be smuggled, and there it is. This is a Captagon pill, and these two little semicircles mark it.

This former corn chip factory was confiscated and repurposed after the owner fled five years ago. Bags of chemicals are now stacked on the walls instead of corn and flavorings.

This is the room where the pills were actually made. As you can see, it was hastily abandoned as some of this liquid from the chemical mixture is still drying in some pots. Come here. This is a palette with small molds into which the mixed chemicals are poured and the pills are hardened.

On the walls there were bunks where the workers slept in shifts to produce large quantities of the drug at high speed. Factories like this have been found across Syria. This is one of the biggest. The rebels who discovered this production facility estimate that there are at least 2.5 million pills in this room alone.

There are millions of dollars worth of drugs piled on these pallets, and this is how they smuggled them. This is a household voltage regulator. When you open it, there is a drum inside. But break through and into this drum. Captagon pills.

Abu Rashid, one of the HTS fighters guarding the factory, says they were not surprised to find such quantities.

Abu Rashid, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham fighter (through interpreter): What he has done here is to produce drugs to destroy an entire generation of people just to increase his own wealth and power.