The Middle East Drug Fueling War, Crime and All-Night Parties

AMMAN, Jordan—Another urgent conflict in the Middle East is playing out on the border between Syria and Jordan: a war against captagon, an amphetamine-like drug that’s taken off across the region.

The drug cuts across social class and borders. It’s used by taxi drivers handling late-night shifts, militia fighters looking to induce courage, students studying for exams, and high-powered executives wanting to work, or party, long hours.

It’s all added up to a multibillion-dollar drug trade that is fueling more conflict in the region. Money from drug smuggling has lined the pockets of Iran-backed militias, including Hezbollah, which has spent vast amounts of its proceeds on weapons to fight Israel . The drug props up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad , whose regime has become one of the world’s biggest drug syndicates, helping it offset years of punishing Western economic sanctions.

Syria has denied any involvement in the drug trade.

U.S. officials are increasingly worried that the captagon trade is undermining decades of relative stability in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, crucial American allies. Jordan has deployed about a third of its army to help curb the flow of drugs across its border with Syria, as well as weapons trafficked by the same networks, a senior Jordanian security official said.

Much of the production takes place in Syria, officials and researchers say, with some in Lebanon. Smugglers might move the drugs from Syria through the official crossing to Jordan by stashing them in trucks, or by hiring women and children to stuff the pills in their tops or their shoes. In the desert, smugglers use catapults to throw the drug over border walls or drones. Or they simply go by foot, particularly in winter when fog and dust reduce visibility at night to about a yard.

The New Lines Institute, a Washington think tank, estimates that the global captagon market is worth about $5.7 billion, more than half as much as the cocaine market in Europe. Of that, the Assad regime fetched an annual average of about $2.4 billion between 2020 to 2022—roughly one-fourth of Syria’s GDP—according to the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks, a Syrian and Arab research organization that tracks the captagon trade.

In mid-October, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned three people it said were involved in the illegal production and trafficking of captagon to the benefit of the Assad regime and Hezbollah. One was the owner of a factory in Syria that the Treasury said has served as a front compan​y, sending pills worth over $1.5 billion to Europe concealed in industrial paper rolls. Europe has become a key transshipment hub for captagon destined for the Arabian Peninsula, according to drug-trafficking agencies.

Since Israel launched its war on Gaza, the number of captagon seizures on the Jordanian-Syrian border have increased fourfold, often accompanied by illicit arms shipments, according to the New Lines Institute. U.S. officials say they worry that drug smuggling will lead to increased Iranian weapons smuggling to Palestinian factions in the West Bank.

In what appears to be one of the deadliest incidents in the war against the drug so far, in January, two explosions destroyed a home in the tiny village of Orman, a Syrian desert outpost about 15 miles north of the Jordanian border. Ten people were killed, including five women and two children.

Syria blamed the blast on Jordanian airstrikes—a rare Jordanian military action on foreign soil. Jordan is suspected of carrying out at least four other attacks in southern Syria. Jordan declined to comment on the airstrikes, but in a statement after the January strike said it would continue to confront dangers from drug and weapons smugglers.

“The Syrian regime is creating an example for states that are weathered and under sanctions and are looking to make a buck, a very good buck,” said Caroline Rose, an expert on the captagon trade at the New Lines Institute.

The drug’s origins

Amphetamines historically have been the drug of choice in the Gulf, partly due to the scarcity of most of the drugs that are prevalent in the West, said Oscar D’Agnone, medical director of the OAD Clinic in London, which treats people from the Middle East for drug addiction.

“Captagon is their cocaine,” D’Agnone said.

Captagon was the brand name of a drug originally manufactured in Germany in the 1960s to treat narcolepsy, depression and attention-deficit disorder, then was banned in most countries in 1986. Bulgarian criminal groups moved production into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a stronghold of Hezbollah, in the 1990s.

The Syrian war in 2011, paired with a collapse of the political and economic order in Lebanon, allowed the captagon trade to grow across embattled borders and ungoverned spaces into Mediterranean ports and international shipping lanes.

As the Assad regime reimposed its grip on the country, it seized facilities and industrialized the drug’s production. It has ramped up production over the past decade, desperate for cash amid a civil war and international sanctions.

In one video from a Syrian production facility, shared with The Wall Street Journal by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Washington-based Syrian antiregime advocacy group, several machines spat hundreds of beige-colored pills from metal spouts into plastic baskets. Another showed bags of captagon pills in piles, emblazoned with the logo of the Lexus luxury-car manufacturer, commonly used for higher-quality captagon.

Captagon’s main ingredient is pseudoephedrine, commonly found in cold and flu medication. According to the United Nations, Syria in 2020 reported anticipated imports of 110,000 pounds of pseudoephedrine, more than the U.K. and nearly half the amount reported by global pharma hub Switzerland. Syria, which has seen the collapse of its health sector and pharmaceutical industry after a decade of war, didn’t explain why it needed such large quantities.

Syria’s elite military Fourth Armored Division, commanded by the president’s brother Maher al-Assad, oversees most of the captagon production and distribution, said U.S., European and Arab officials. The Treasury’s recent sanctions also targeted a man it said was involved in trafficking, and had sold weapons to the Fourth Armored Division and donated more than $1 million to Hezbollah.

“The regime continues to fully rely on captagon,” said Col. Farid al-Qassem, a Syrian defector who fought in the civil war against Assad and now works with U.S. troops based in eastern Syria. “They can’t operate without these drugs.”

Shoot to kill

Traffickers carry other types of drugs through Syria, too, in particular crystal meth. The Jordanian security official estimated that drugs worth $8 billion to $10 billion cross the border from Syria each year, ferried by impoverished Syrians who make up to $10,000 a run. Hezbollah assists the Syrian regime in facilitating trafficking in areas under their control, and secures houses of drug dealers in southern Syria, the official said.

Clashes with armed infiltrators have turned so violent that Jordanian soldiers have adopted a shoot-to-kill policy.

At an army base, Jordanian intelligence agents showed the Journal grainy surveillance footage of three people inside a Syrian regime military base launching a drone that the officials believed to be carrying drugs toward the Jordanian border.

In another surveillance video, children walked with pack donkeys at night to drop drugs at the side of the Yarmouk River separating the two countries for pick up later. In a third video, a row of presumed smugglers carrying backpacks walked past a Syrian army outpost, with no interference from the soldiers a stone’s throw away.

Videos supplied separately by SETF showed what the activists said was a drone carrying presumed drugs from southern Syria toward the Jordanian border, and smugglers hauling sacks of captagon on their backs, escorted by men in fatigues, presumably Syrian regime soldiers.

Smugglers even use homing pigeons that have been trained to carry up to 2½ ounces of crystal meth. The Jordanian intelligence agents showed the Journal photos of a captured bird, caught on its way from Syria to Jordan with a small bag of white powder tied behind each of its legs.

Washington’s worry

In December 2022, President Biden signed the Captagon Act, requiring the U.S. to develop a strategy to disrupt captagon smuggling networks and build law-enforcement partnerships in the Middle East. A bipartisan bill passed the House in April requiring new sanctions against manufacturers and traffickers of captagon.

The U.S. hasn’t deployed troops to assist the Jordanians in the fight against captagon, but it does supply Jordan with satellite-guided bombs that Human Rights Watch has identified as being used to target alleged drug kingpins on Syrian soil. The U.S. also advises Jordanian security forces on how to use airborne surveillance sensors, drones and intercept communications, U.S. officials said.

Despite U.S. opposition, Jordan alongside Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other Arab nations normalized relations with the Syrian government last year in return for Assad pledging to crack down on captagon.

At first, the bargain appeared to work. In May 2023, Syria was readmitted into the Arab League after 12 years of exclusion. The next day, a presumed Jordanian airstrike killed Merhi al-Ramthan, a well-known cartel boss in southern Syria, with his wife and six children. Hours later, Jordan said it had formed a joint security force with Syria to combat drug trafficking, and Syrian state media said security forces had seized a million captagon pills. By the end of the month, Assad received red-carpet treatment at the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Since then, the captagon trade has continued unabated. Jordanian officials said Syria’s initial cooperation was mostly for show. Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister Ayman Safadi met with Assad earlier this month to discuss the threat of drug smuggling, according to Jordan’s foreign ministry.

Jordan’s antidrug department last year arrested about 35,000 people on drug charges, a 24% increase from the year before. In June, Jordanian authorities foiled two smuggling operations involving nearly 10 million illicit pills, worth up to $200 million, destined for Saudi Arabia.

‘Unfulfilled life’

The torrent of drugs amounts to a societal crisis in the Arab world.

Syrian-produced captagon is often mixed with unknown quantities of substances such as caffeine, various anesthetics and sedatives, and even toxic levels of zinc and nickel. Pills destined for Saudi Arabia often contain Viagra. Users often pair captagon with other drugs that in recent years have become more available in the region, such as crystal meth and ketamine.

“As far as I can tell, the use of captagon has doubled in recent years,” said Abdullah Boulad, chief executive and founder of The Balance healthcare group, which runs luxury drug rehab clinics in Europe.

He said many of his patients are affluent Gulf Arabs who, after returning from study or work in the West, struggle to adjust to their home countries’ more restrictive social and legal environment. “It creates this unfulfilled life, and this is where captagon comes in,” Boulad said.

In Saudi Arabia, authorities have erected checkpoints in cities to catch captagon smugglers and users. This month, Saudi authorities confiscated 1.3 million captagon pills hidden inside a shipment of marble mixing material near the border with Jordan, and dismantled a drug trafficking ring in Riyadh that included more than a dozen government employees. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad al-Sudani has warned about the link between drug trafficking and terrorism financing, and this month security forces confiscated one million captagon pills from a drug network in western Iraq.

Captagon’s reach is widening. Ports in Italy and Greece have made large seizures, and Dutch and German authorities have busted captagon labs in their own countries. A German court in August began the trial against four men arrested after a record bust in the country of hundreds of kilos of captagon tablets worth an estimated $60 million.

“It’s becoming extremely clear that these illicit networks are trying to create a foothold in Europe,” said Rose, of the New Lines Institute. “Captagon is likely going to trickle into Europe and potentially also American markets. This is something that I would not have said about a year or two ago.”

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com