A Captagon pill, recognizable by its two crescents. (Credit: Joseph Eid/AFP)
Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 in Syria, whose regime was accused of running a narco-state at the helm of global captagon production, the spot has become up for grabs. Syrian authorities reportedly destroyed nearly 200 million pills discovered after the Assad clan’s collapse, compared to almost 300 million tablets seized in 2023, according to a World Bank report.While studies are still lacking on who has definitively taken over supply — especially to Gulf countries, the main consumers — an increasing number of reports point to new production centers in Sudan. A few laboratories were uncovered and dismantled by Khartoum before April 2023, when civil war erupted between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The war, however, appears to have acted as a catalyst, particularly since Sudan borders the Red Sea across...
Following the fall of Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 in Syria, whose regime was accused of running a narco-state at the helm of global captagon production, the spot has become up for grabs. Syrian authorities reportedly destroyed nearly 200 million pills discovered after the Assad clan’s collapse, compared to almost 300 million tablets seized in 2023, according to a World Bank report.While studies are still lacking on who has definitively taken over supply — especially to Gulf countries, the main consumers — an increasing number of reports point to new production centers in Sudan. A few laboratories were uncovered and dismantled by Khartoum before April 2023, when civil war erupted between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The war, however, appears to have acted as a catalyst, particularly since Sudan borders the Red Sea...
