ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraqi police on Wednesday seized 250,000 captagon pills from a school under renovation, the interior ministry said, as the consumption of the narcotic rapidly spreads across the Middle East.
The captagon was found at a school in Anbar province’s capital of Ramadi, near Iraq’s border with Syria which is where the tablets likely originated from.
Iraq’s interior ministry said police in Ramadi had “seized 250,000 captagon pills and one kilogram of hashish at a school under maintenance.” Without providing details, it said that investigations were underway to arrest the perpetrators.
Security forces have ramped up their efforts in operations to seize narcotics across the country, with hundreds of people being arrest. Three million captagon pills were seized in March at the border crossing between Iraq and Syria in al-Qaim.
Captagon is an amphetamine-type stimulant which has been spreading across the drug market in the Middle East, with Syria as the main supplier, and Saudi Arabia the primary consumer of the substance.
A report by the New Lines Institute last year on captagon trade in the region said that Syrian state figures, members of allied militias including Lebanon’s Hezbollah benefit from the process.
Numerous US sanctions have been slammed on Syrians involved in the drug trafficking, including two cousins of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as well as Lebanese affiliates.
AFP has labeled Syria as a “narco-state.” An investigation by the BBC published this week also identified links between the captagon trade and the Assad family. After over a decade of war, sanctions, and a faltering economy, the drug has become a strong form of revenue for the regime.
Syria was welcomed back into the Arab League and at a meeting in May, the foreign ministers of Jordan and Iraq called to increase cooperation in fighting the influx of captagon across their borders.
