It is nicknamed "Abu Hilalain" in Arabic ("the father of the two crescent moons") because of its logo. This little pill, better known as captagon, has been flooding the Gulf countries, mainly Saudi Arabia, for about ten years. Produced mainly in Syria, this synthetic drug was at the heart of discussions on the reintegration of Damascus into the Arab League which meets Friday, May 19, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. President Bashar al-Assad will be present. A first in nearly twelve years.

"If there is official normalization on May 19, it will be the culmination of a process whose realization could not have taken place without the prior lifting of a veto by Saudi Arabia, which is the heavyweight of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)," says David Rigoulet-Roze, associate researcher at IRIS and a specialist in the Middle East. A principle of reality prevailed within the Arab League by agreeing - if not unanimously - that Bashar al-Assad would remain in power. The question was to determine under what conditions this could be done and how."

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The former pariah is asked to distance himself from Iran, his staunch ally with Russia, but above all he is enjoined to cut the Gordian knot of captagon trafficking. A juicy traffic that has turned Syria into a real narco-state. "I thought Iran would be the main item on the agenda, as well as the repatriation of refugees, but I was surprised by the prominent place of the captagon in the negotiations between the Syrian regime and the Arab League," said Caroline Rose, director of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a Washington-based think tank. Member countries know that the regime has dedicated trafficking agencies and they think that with enough incentives, they can convince it to abandon trade."

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Express Orient. © France 24

A real scourge in the Middle East, the "cocaine of the poor" has generated, in 2021, $ 5.7 billion (5.2 billion euros), according to the New Lines Institute, a figure that AFP estimates, meanwhile, at more than $ 10 billion (9.2 billion euros).

According to AFP estimates based on official captagon seizures, the market was worth $10 billion in 2021. © AFP

For Syria, banned from the international scene since the beginning of the civil war in 2011 and hampered in its trade by Western sanctions, the trafficking of captagon has been a real breath of fresh air.

"It is a manna able to offset the devastating economic effects of the civil war and Western sanctions - including the American Caesar Law voted in December 2019 - imposed on the Damascus regime," says David Rigoulet-Roze.

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Focus © Capture France 24

The captagon, a huge financial windfall

While Saudi Arabia supported rebel groups against government forces in the early years of the war, it now seems determined to bring Syria back into the fold of the Arab League. On April 18, $4 billion in investments were reportedly proposed to Damascus during the visit of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, according to Reuters. The information has been denied by Riyadh, but leaves doubt as to an exchange of good practices or even bargaining.

"The hypothesis of the agreement is that the regime has resolved to the trafficking of captagon because of economic constraints and the lack of legal revenues and that it is enough to open and turn the tap of the legal trade for it to stop," says Caroline Rose. But it will take a long time and many close to or allied with the regime will not necessarily have a reason to stop production. The captagon is a huge windfall of money."

Bashar al-Assad never uttered the word captagon himself.

A lifeline of the Syrian economy, the trafficking and smuggling of the captagon benefits a vast galaxy of personalities who gravitate around the president. But there is to date no "irrefutable evidence directly linking Bashar al-Assad to the captagon industry and we should not necessarily expect to find one," said Ian Larson, Syria specialist at the Center for Operational Analysis and Research (Coar) in an investigation published by AFP at the end of 2022.

"Bashar al-Assad never uttered the word captagon himself. But if we look at his connections, he has family members, friends, close allies of the regime who are involved in this trafficking, says Caroline Rose. For example, his brother Maher al-Assad, head of the Syrian army's fourth division, is particularly involved in trafficking in the Latakia region, Homs, Aleppo and southern Syria." David Rigoulet-Roze recalls, for his part, that "cousins of Bashar al-Assad were sanctioned by the EU in April 2023 for trafficking captagon".

Still, the ramifications of this web go far beyond the Syrian borders. Lebanon's powerful Hezbollah, backed by Iran, was the first to set up production labs in the early 2000s. It would always play an important role in protecting this thriving trade along the Lebanese border. According to a report by the New Lines Institute, the Syrian government uses "local alliance structures with other armed groups such as Hezbollah to obtain technical and logistical support in captagon production and trafficking."

A reintegration above all symbolic

Under such conditions, could Syria survive the end of the captagon? For Caroline Rose, the financial stakes are far too great for the actors involved to simply give a blank check to the authorities. "If normalization is not deemed sufficient, many close to or allied with the regime will be tempted to continue captagon production while profiting from the revenues from the revival of legal trade. I can see the regime playing both sides by trying to take advantage of this reopening while continuing to produce on a large scale."

Although Syria's reintegration into the Arab League remains primarily symbolic, Bashar al-Assad seems inclined to show a white paw. On May 1, even before the official announcement of its reintegration into the Arab League, Syria pledged to "take the necessary measures to stop smuggling at the borders with Jordan and Iraq" after a meeting with Egyptian, Iraqi, Saudi and Jordanian foreign ministers in Amman. A week later, Merhi Al-Ramthan, considered the captagon baron in the region, was murdered along with his entire family in southern Syria in an airstrike attributed to Jordan.

"In the past, the Damascus regime has been able to take measures when it was necessary to give guarantees of rapprochement to its Arab neighbors," recalls David Rigoulet-Roze, who cites "the multiplication of seizures in November 2021 and the restriction of flows to the outside, especially to Jordan whose border has been reopened but which is overexposed to the flows of this traffic likely to destabilize the small Hashemite kingdom, now engaged in a ruthless fight against traffickers."

Captagon seizures in 2021 according to AFP counts. © AFP

For Western countries, caution is required. Even if this drug remains for the moment the prerogative of the countries of the Levant, measures are taken such as the Captagon Act adopted in the United States in December 2022. "The U.S. is concerned about the speed with which normalization is taking place, not to mention that many promises could jeopardize U.S. sanctions on the Syrian economy," Rose said.

Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq... Many countries that are victims of Captagon hope to witness its twilight. "As in any illicit trade, it is impossible to stop everything completely, tempers however the director of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. When one actor gives up, another takes over. However, I think that if the regime really wants to stop, we will see the traffic collapse massively. There is not so much other actor that could replace the production capacity of the regime."

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