LONDON: Syrian authorities said on Wednesday they had thwarted an attempt to smuggle a large shipment of narcotics into neighboring Jordan using balloons.
Officers seized 70 kg of hashish, 45,000 captagon pills and equipment allegedly used in the operation, the state-run SANA news agency reported, citing the country’s Drug Enforcement Department.
The seizure was the latest in a series of counternarcotics operations near Syria’s southern border.
On Saturday, authorities said they disrupted another attempt to smuggle drugs out of the country during a security operation targeting a criminal network in the southern Quneitra countryside.
Syria has stepped up efforts to curb the trade since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the installation of a transitional government.
During the country’s long civil war, which started in 2011, and while Assad’s government faced sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the captagon trade was widely believed to generate billions of dollars for Assad and his allies.
The current administration has pledged to dismantle the drug supply chain and has publicly destroyed large quantities of seized captagon as part of that campaign.
Captagon, a highly addictive stimulant, has been trafficked illegally from the Middle East to Africa and elsewhere. About 80 percent of captagon seizures since 2019 have pointed to Syria as the country of origin, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Within a year of Assad’s fall, Syrian authorities had dismantled 15 industrial-scale drug laboratories and 13 smaller storage facilities, according to a December 2025 UN Office on Drugs and Crime research paper.
The report said, however, that captagon production was likely continuing elsewhere in the Middle East.
