Why Nazis, but how ISIS Became the Middle East’s Drug Dealer by exploiting the Middle East’s love of an amphetamine called captagon.

By Ed Caesar November 4, 2024

Syria has now endured thirteen years of civil war. More than half a million Syrians have died in the fighting; five million have fled abroad. The country’s infrastructure and legitimate economy have been shattered, and the regime is heavily sanctioned internationally. But, with the support of Iran and Russia, Assad has survived, and his government now controls about three-quarters of the country. In the past few years, he has found a desperately needed source of income in captagon.

In Syria, a single pill of the stimulant costs a few cents to produce. But that pill can be sold elsewhere in the Middle East—the only part of the world where captagon is a popular drug—for as much as twenty-five dollars, especially in wealthy cities such as Riyadh. The margins of the business are high enough that exporters can be unsuccessful as often as not and still reap giant profits. The Assad regime now controls much of the captagon trade, making billions of dollars a year. The most significant figure in the government’s production and distribution of captagon is reportedly the President’s younger brother Maher al-Assad, who is the head of the 4th Division of the Syrian Army, a unit founded in 1984 to protect the government from all threats to its authority. Caroline Rose, who studies the captagon trade at the New Lines Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., told me that Syria’s amphetamine business is worth some ten billion dollars. The country’s official gross domestic product is only nine billion.

Michael Kenney, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who researches the transnational drug trade, told me that although the term “narco-state” is often misused, it describes Syria perfectly. Assad’s regime has become dependent on captagon, much the way Bolivia’s government relied on the cocaine trade in the early eighties, and the Taliban stayed afloat on opium revenue during the years that it was fighting U.S. forces for control of Afghanistan. Kenney said of the Assad regime, “State institutions have been thoroughly penetrated and corrupted by drug activities. Significant elements of the Army, of the security apparatus, are directly involved in various aspects of the trade. And the government itself—to the extent that there is one—has become heavily reliant on the revenues from captagon exports in order to maintain its governance.”

Jordan, which abuts much of Syria’s southern border, is now an important overland route to Saudi Arabia, where the vast majority of captagon pills are consumed. And Jordan itself has become an increasingly fertile market for the amphetamine. Signs of drug wealth are now obvious in Ar-Ramtha, where run-down houses stand next to gaudy new mansions with gold-painted walls. (A British diplomat in Jordan described such buildings to me as examples of the local “narchitecture.”) The Jordanian government is determined to impede the movement of drugs through its territory. Much of its military is stationed on the border with Syria, despite the wider conflict that has shaken the region since last October. Clashes with armed traffickers are frequent.

Captagon has developed a reputation as a soldier’s drug. This has some basis in fact. Since the production of synthetic amphetamine and methamphetamine became widespread, in the first half of the twentieth century, such drugs have been attractive to sleep-deprived fighters. In the Second World War, the first conflict in which uppers became widespread, the German military used Pervitin, a methamphetamine, to energize its troops. Royal Air Force airmen on nighttime missions sometimes turned to Benzedrine—an amphetamine that was originally formulated as an asthma medication—which they called Wakey Wakey pills.

Captagon has been used in battle in the Arab world. Saddam Hussein’s Army was a top client of the Bulgarian mobsters who produced the drug. Fighters on all sides of the conflict in Syria have taken captagon. On June 12, 2018, coalition forces battling ISIS found and destroyed three hundred thousand captagon pills belonging to the Islamist group. Last year, the Israel Defense Forces reported finding captagon pills on the bodies of Hamas fighters killed during the October 7th attacks.

These discoveries notwithstanding, European tabloids have exaggerated the threat of what they call “jihadi speed.” After the ISIS attacks in Paris in 2015, such outlets reported that using captagon had made the perpetrators fearless and aggressive enough to commit suicidal violence. There was never any evidence to support this claim; autopsies of the bodies of the terrorists showed that they had not ingested alcohol or narcotics. Nor can jihadism account for the volume of captagon being produced, or for the enormous profits it generates. There are only so many jihadis. The major user base for captagon is broadly the same as the one Reda Yastas found in the late seventies: workers and students looking for a strong pick-me-up that won’t derail their day.

Half a century ago, amphetamines became popular among truckers in the United States. On a recent trip to Jordan, I was told that truck drivers who stop at roadside coffee venders often order a qahwa mazbouta: a “blended coffee,” which costs about ten dollars. A captagon pill gets crushed and mixed into the drink. On the streets of Syria, meanwhile, one can ask for a ya mas-hrny—a “keep me awake” pill.

Saudi Arabia, in particular, appears to be flooded with captagon, given the scale of the seizures that authorities there are making. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime has stated that between 2012 and 2021 sixty-seven per cent of the captagon officially seized by authorities was either inside or bound for the kingdom. A working assumption by anti-narcotics experts is that police forces generally catch about twenty per cent of trafficked drugs. Saudi Arabia claims that between May, 2023, and July, 2024, it seized seventy-six million captagon pills. The country has a population of only thirty-two million.

Matthew Zweig, the sanctions expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, was less certain about such a clean narrative. Over time, he pointed out, drug empires develop rival centers of power, and the criminals involved in the captagon trade were no doubt determined to keep their businesses going. Zweig didn’t doubt that Syria’s 4th Division was heavily involved in the captagon business. But the amphetamine and methamphetamine markets in the Middle East had possibly grown beyond Assad’s control. Zweig noted that the Arab League’s decision to resume relations with Assad was made partly in the hope that he could stop captagon from saturating the region. But the captagon trade was still strong, and possibly growing. Zweig asked, “Is that because Assad won’t stop it—or because he can’t?” ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/how-syria-became-the-middle-easts-drug-dealer