Report Highlights Importance of Narcotics Trafficking for Hezbollah Finances
October 29, 2024
2:11 PM
Reading time: 2 minutes
A report this week in the Wall Street Journal news portal highlighted the increasing use of captagon, an "amphetamine-like drug" among a wide variety of consumers across the Middle East, and pointed to its popularity as a main source of funding for the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. The US State Department has raised the alarm about this trade in narcotics, saying it poses an increasing risk of regional instability.
According to the Atlantic Council think tank, over 1 billion captagon pills were seized by police in the Gulf states between 2019-2022. The New Lines Institute, another Washington DC-based think tank, estimates that the global volume of captagon trafficking is around $5.7 billion annually.
The think tank added that it's not just terrorist organizations and criminal syndicates who are making money off captagon trafficking, but Syria's Assad regime is also deeply involved.
A large amount of the captagon produced in Syria is sent north into Europe, but large volumes are also sent south in the Persian Gulf countries, with large seizures of captagon being reported by the Jordanian border police. Jordan has even used military force against the smugglers, including air strikes by Jordanian F-16s along the border. Israel is highly concerned with this situation because it is believed that Iran uses the same routes that the captagon smugglers use to send weapons to terrorist factions in Judea and Samaria.
“The regime continues to fully rely on captagon…They can’t operate without these drugs,” said Col. Farid al-Qassem, a Syrian defector who fought against the Assad regime in the civil war.
Hezbollah has assisted the Syrian regime in "facilitating trafficking in areas under their control," a Jordanian security official told the WSJ.