RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s counter-narcotics authorities assisted their Iraqi counterparts on Sunday to thwart an attempt to smuggle millions of toxic amphetamine pills.
Col. Talal bin Abdul Mohsen bin Shalhoub, the security spokesman of the Ministry of Interior, said Iraqi authorities seized 7 million amphetamine pills based on information supplied from the ministry and the General Directorate of Narcotics Control.
Criminals had concealed the drugs within a shipment of children’s toys and ironing boards, the Saudi News Agency reported.
Iraqi authorities cooperated positively, he added, and seized the narcotics shipment, affirming Riyadh and Baghdad’s commitment to countering drug smuggling and confronting criminal networks.
The drug shipment is the largest ever seized in Iraq. With assistance from Saudi Arabia, Iraqi authorities tracked and intercepted the shipment as it traveled from Syria, through Turkiye, and toward the Iraqi territory.
Western anti-narcotics officials say the addictive, amphetamine-type stimulant known as captagon has for years been mass-produced in Syria.
Captagon — a mix of amphetamines also known as the “poor man’s cocaine” — is one of the more popular recreational drugs among affluent youth in the Middle East.
It was the first such seizure announced since the toppling in December of Syrian president Bashar Assad, whose government was at the heart of the trade in areas he controlled, experts have said.
Captagon became Syria’s largest export during the country’s civil war that began in 2011.
Iraq in 2022 announced it had seized six million pills, and in 2024 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) said the country had experienced a “dramatic increase” in both the trafficking and use of captagon in the previous five years.
“In 2023 alone, authorities (in Iraq) seized a record-high 24 million captagon tablets — the equivalent of over 4.1 tons, with an estimated retail value of between $84 million and $144 million,” a UNDOC report said.
It said that between 2019 and 2023, about 82 percent of the captagon seized in the Middle East originated from Syria, followed by Lebanon at 17 percent.
The new authorities in Damascus have announced the destruction of around 100 million captagon pills but the trade persists, a diplomatic source who follows the issue said.
“Lower-ranking operators are showing resilience, adapting, and remaining in place despite political or security changes,” the source said.
“It is therefore not surprising to see trafficking continue, whether through the sale of existing stockpiles or the establishment of new production.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said that trafficking from Syria was ongoing and that there were still captagon factories operating in the country.
* With AFP
keywords
