LONDON: More than a year after Syrian rebels swept longtime ruler Bashar Assad from power, the Captagon empire that underpinned his regime has survived his fall. It has mutated into trafficking networks that stretch across a landscape of porous borders and fragmented authority.
Determined to dismantle that infrastructure, Jordan and Syria’s interim government, led by President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, have intensified efforts against Captagon trafficking, targeting networks that have adapted to the power vacuum left by Assad’s fall.
In early May, Jordan’s air force carried out what it called a “deterrence operation” targeting sites “belonging to arms and drug traffickers along the kingdom’s northern border.”
The army said on May 3 it had “identified, based on intelligence and operational information, the locations of factories, laboratories, and warehouses used by these groups as launchpads for operations into Jordanian territory, which were subsequently targeted and destroyed.”
“Smuggling has evolved quite significantly over the past year,” Benjamin Feve, senior research analyst at Karam Shaar Advisory, told Arab News. (Reuters/File)
Syria’s state TV reported that the strikes hit a drugs and weapons cache in the southern Suweida governorate, parts of which remain outside the interim authorities’ control and under de facto armed faction rule.
Local sources cited by the broadcaster said the strikes appeared to target sites in the city of Shahba, which is controlled by the paramilitary National Guard — a unified force established in the summer of 2025 amid clashes and instability in the south.
The May 3 operation was reportedly Jordan’s fifth military strike in Syria since Assad’s removal in December 2024, and the third since July 2025, when local militia groups reportedly consolidated control over the area, which was once a flashpoint of rights violations involving Druze and Bedouin communities.
Jordan’s air force has carried out pre-emptive strikes in Syria since late 2023, reportedly targeting militia infrastructure linked to the drug trade. Western counternarcotics officials say Captagon is mass-produced in Syria and that Jordan is a key transit route to lucrative Gulf markets.
The strikes signify a broader shift in the trade’s dynamics. Although Captagon smuggling has declined over the past year — Syria’s interior ministry said domestic production had been virtually eradicated by late 2025 after intensive raids on facilities once run by Assad’s regime — the industry is far from collapsed.
“Smuggling has evolved quite significantly over the past year,” Benjamin Feve, senior research analyst at Karam Shaar Advisory, told Arab News.
“Trying to curtail the Captagon trade is much more than just a security issue,” said Benjamin Feve. (Iraq Border Authority/AFP/File)
“Under Assad, the model was more centralized and industrial, with large-scale production networks linked to regime and militia structures,” he said. “Following the collapse of his regime, we saw these large factories being raided by the new authorities, dismantled, and their capital goods and products destroyed.”
Since then, he added, “the trade appears to have become more fragmented and adaptive, with traffickers using drones, balloons, terrain, smaller cells, and mixed drug-and-arms routes to bypass tighter border controls.”
While the Captagon trade was long associated with Iran-aligned networks and allied smugglers in the southern governorate of Deraa, several recent media reports claim Suweida is emerging as an increasingly important hub, aided by weak and fractured state control.
The province grew more isolated in the spring and summer of 2025 amid clashes between Syrian forces and local militias, with the National Guard entrenching its dominance there.
FASTFACTS
• During the civil war, Syria emerged as the main origin point for most regional Captagon.
• The trade was widely tied to Assad-era elites and military units.
• Gulf markets are the main target of traffickers.
Suweida forms part of the historic Hauran region and is considered the natural extension of Jabal Hauran. It borders Deraa to the west, Rif Dimashq to the north and northeast, Jordan to the south and southeast, and the Syrian Desert to the east, with no access to the Mediterranean Sea.
Jordan-based political economist Sanad El-Naser said that in conflict-affected areas such as Suweida, the illicit drug trade “has evolved into a parallel war economy that finances the operations of armed networks and sustains informal power structures.”
Continued production in southern Syria after Assad’s fall “indicates that the issue is no longer exclusively linked to a single political leadership,” he told Arab News,
Syria’s Anti-Narcotics Department seizes one million Captagon pills that came from Lebanon. (AFP/File)
“Criminal networks are capable of relocating, reorganizing, and integrating into local power dynamics,” he said.
He added: “During the early stages of the Syrian conflict, parts of the Captagon trade were centralized and linked to regime-affiliated groups. After Assad’s fall and regional fragmentation, trafficking has become more dispersed and adaptable.”
Supply may be dwindling, but demand is still largely at Assad-era levels, according to a report by the Damascus-based Etana Center for Research and Documentation.
The think tank recorded a 60 percent reduction in cross-border smuggling attempts in the first two months after Assad fled to Russia on Dec. 8, 2023, compared with the same period in the previous smuggling season.
Even so, it warned that the root causes driving the trade are entrenched in southern Syria’s border communities.
“Under Assad, the model was more centralized and industrial, with large-scale production networks linked to regime and militia structures,” Karam Shaar said. (AFP/File)
That contraction in supply has pushed prices, and therefore profits, higher.
Caroline Rose, a Captagon expert at New Lines Institute, said that “while there is a clear supply shortage overall imposed by the fall of the Assad regime, there are still continued Captagon smuggling operations that prove demand levels have remained largely the same.”
Rose told Arab News that “the reduction in supply has increased the profitability of Captagon, with pills now priced higher. This is a major incentive for criminal actors and a reason why this trade will never completely disappear in the region without proactive measures to reduce demand levels.”
Indeed, on May 14, Syrian authorities said they thwarted an attempt to smuggle 142,000 Captagon pills into Jordan, with traffickers using GPS-equipped balloons and remote-control systems to ferry drugs across the border, according to state news agency SANA.
INNUMBERS
• 177m Captagon tablets intercepted in the Arab region from December 2024 to December 2025.
(Source: UNODC)
Nearly two days later, Indian authorities foiled an attempt to smuggle 227.7 kilograms of Captagon and arrested a Syrian citizen. Officials said the shipment originated in Syria and was bound for Gulf markets.
Feve said: “Captagon is no longer just a cross-border smuggling problem — it is quite embedded in the political economy of the Syrian conflict, involving producers, transport networks, armed actors, corrupt officials, and cross-border facilitators.
“These networks, while they may have decreased in size following the collapse of the Assad regime, are still very much present — and there is a lot of money to be made,” he said.
Supply may be dwindling, but demand is still largely at Assad-era levels, according to a report by the Damascus-based Etana Center for Research and Documentation. (Reuters/File)
“Even if the fall of the Assad regime disrupted parts of the old system, it did not automatically remove the networks or the incentives behind the trade.
“Jordan’s reported Captagon seizures and joint operations in early 2026 suggest that the flow is still substantial, but the model is becoming more flexible and harder to disrupt through conventional border patrols alone.”
Feve also noted that Captagon tends to be more prevalent in poor areas of southern Syria.
“You also have to look at influential political and religious actors in southern Syria who are known to be involved in these networks,” he said. “Trying to curtail the Captagon trade is much more than just a security issue.
“Border enforcement can disrupt shipments, but it cannot dismantle the ecosystem behind it.”
Feve added: “To really stop the Captagon trade and address all of its harmful effects, you would need financial investigation, local security reform, judicial cooperation, pressure on production networks, and some form of economic alternative for areas where smuggling has become a livelihood.”
El-Naser, the Jordanian political economist, echoed that assessment, arguing that cross-border strikes — while necessary — address only one dimension of a structural problem.
“Any long-term strategy to dismantle the Captagon economy must integrate security operations with broader state-building initiatives,” he said.
Achieving this, however, will be very difficult given the reality of Syria’s fragile transition, which is characterized by weakened institutions inherited from the ousted regime, a war-ravaged infrastructure, sectarian and revenge killings, unrest in several regions, and the resurgence of the Daesh terrorist group.
“The new Syrian administration is just over a year old,” said New Lines Institute’s Rose. “Its institutions, particularly its counternarcotics and police force, are just building capacity.
On May 14, Syrian authorities said they thwarted an attempt to smuggle 142,000 Captagon pills into Jordan. (Syrian Interior Ministry)
“The central government is also handling a wide spectrum of priorities across its security, legal, economic, and political sectors that can deprioritize any sort of sustained counternarcotics campaign.”
While the ministry of interior “has conducted some major interdictions across the country and has built out a more expansive network of informants on the ground,” Rose said, “its blind spot is southern Syria — a haven for drug smuggling activity into Jordan.”
She added: “The July 2025 clashes and lingering political tensions between Druze factions and the central government have further prevented the Ministry of Interior’s ability to conduct any sort of serious investigation and raid against local criminal syndicates.”
The new Syrian authorities have circulated videos of warehouse discoveries and drug seizures on social media, showing progress in their fight against Captagon.
But experts argue that such measures fall short of addressing the systemic problem. Governance gaps in Syria, analysts say, have driven Jordan to take largely unilateral action to confront what it sees as a national security threat.
Feve, the senior research analyst, stressed that even where political will exists in Syria and Jordan, implementation remains the deeper challenge.
“Even if Jordan and Syria agree politically to cooperate, implementation depends on weak local institutions, fragmented armed actors, limited enforcement capacity, and corruption or collusion within some border and security networks,” he said.
Caroline Rose told Arab News that “the reduction in supply has increased the profitability of Captagon, with pills now priced higher. (Reuters/File)
“A security committee between Jordan and Syria was announced in 2025, and while that is a valuable step, it cannot substitute for effective control on the ground — and that is a prerequisite for everything else.”
That committee — agreed upon in January 2025 to secure the shared border, combat arms and drug smuggling and prevent the resurgence of extremist groups — is the most concrete expression of bilateral cooperation to date.
“Greater cooperation is clearly required — and that is, in fact, what we are seeing today,” Feve said. “But the fact that Syrian authorities do not yet fully control the southern part of the country makes it difficult to collaborate effectively in combating smuggling.”
In retrospect, more than a year after Assad’s fall, the Captagon trade has proved more resilient than the regime that once industrialized it. Factories may have been dismantled and routes disrupted, but weak institutions, fractured authority and enduring regional demand continue to sustain a shadow economy that has adapted to the chaos left behind.
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