The fight against captagon trafficking has emerged as the priority issue for Arab normalization with Syria. The civil war that has been raging for twelve years in the country has seen the production of this synthetic drug flourish, under the control of the Assad clan. Millions of pills flood the Gulf, and sometimes Europe, along smuggling routes through Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey. After having tried, without much success, to block these arrivals, seen as a threat to their national security, countries such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia are now demanding that the Syrian dictator, Bashar Al-Assad, put an end to to this traffic, in exchange for his reinstatement in the Arab League, recorded on Sunday May 7.
The plan is ambitious. Estimated at several billion dollars, captagon smuggling is the lifeline of the Syrian regime. The economy is in the doldrums, and the state budget has fallen to 3.6 billion dollars (3.3 billion euros) in 2022. To see the feverishness of the countries of the region at each interception of narcotics at their borders, President Assad understood that he held a key asset to bring his peers to reconnect with him. The multiplication of catches in recent days confirms that he will use this card as long as he can make a profit from it.
With this intractable partner, who even denies his role in the traffic, the Arab countries are using carrots and sticks. Monday, May 8 at dawn, the day after the announcement of the return of Syria to the Arab fold, a baron of Syrian drug trafficking, Merhi Al-Ramthan, was killed with his wife and six children, in an airstrike against their house in the province of Sueïda, near the Jordanian border. There is little doubt about the involvement of the Hashemite Kingdom. The man, considered the first producer of captagon in the region and the most important smuggler to Jordan, was being tracked down by the authorities in Amman.
“Pledges begin to be given”
These had, moreover, made no secret of their intention to switch to the strong method. In an interview with the American channel CNN on May 5, the head of Jordanian diplomacy, Ayman Safadi, had not ruled out “military actions in Syria” in the absence of effective measures to curb this “dangerous threat”. The kingdom began to step up its fight against drug trafficking, which is increasingly organized and protected by armed groups, in 2022. In doing so, Amman took note of Damascus’ lack of seriousness in the fight against this illegal traffic, by despite the normalization of relations between the two countries, which had taken place the previous year. Jordanian officials confirmed to World, in the spring of 2022, that the army was now authorized to fire on smugglers.
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