LONDON: Syrian authorities seized 25 million captagon pills bound for smuggling and arrested seven members of an international trafficking network in a large and sophisticated operation.
On Wednesday, Syria’s Drug Enforcement Administration discovered drugs hidden inside a shipment of pottery containers before they were prepared for transport. Seven smugglers were arrested, including the gang’s leader, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency.
Last week, anti-narcotics authorities thwarted an attempt to smuggle 142,000 captagon pills. The smugglers used balloons equipped with GPS tracking and remote-control methods to transport the drugs into Jordan near the southern territory of Syria.
Since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, anti-narcotics authorities there have increasingly been conducting operations to crack down on cross-border criminal networks.
Under the former president, Bashar Assad, Syria became a hub for the production and distribution of illegal drugs such as captagon, while the government largely ignored the concerns of neighboring countries about the negative effects that this was having on the region.
