Syria: Inside the drug factories that bankrolled Assad’s narco state
Now Bashar al Assad has gone, there is so much to see and film in Syria which was impossible to document before.
The extent, for example, of the regime’s involvement in the captagon trade, a speed-like amphetamine which flooded out of Syria and across the Middle East, was widely known but impossible to film, barring stashes discovered at customs or its prevalence across the Gulf party-scene.
Now Syria’s new guard, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), has taken over the villas and factories which belonged to the nation’s drug lords and are more than happy to show journalists how the captagon was produced and by whom.
We visit two locations, one a private villa near the Lebanese border and another, a captagon factory in a suburb outside Damascus. What hits you first is the smell. It’s tangy and metallic and sticks in your nostrils.
The guards at the villa, which looks like a stage set for Breaking Bad, say it gives them headaches. They’ve burnt the stash of captagon pills they discovered but they’ve kept the raw materials – barrels of caffeine, piled up sacks of what looks a bit like flour, and alcohol. They say they’ve been advised it might come in useful for medicines.
“In Idlib, as you know, we were separate,” says Abu Baker, an HTS soldier who’s happy to show me around. “Anyone who engaged in such activities would be kicked out of the city.
“But of course we knew about what was going on in the rest of Syria and with the regime. The regime was broke. The economy was dead. So they financed themselves with drug money.”
Sky News’ international correspondent Diana Magnay inside a captagon ‘factory’
The villas in this neighbourhood belonged to officers from Syria’s 4th armoured division which was run by Assad’s notoriously thuggish brother, Maher. The one we’re in was owned by a man the HTS guards call Colonel Baseem.
“Baseem was the big guy here in this area and he instilled fear in everyone who lived here, everything was off limits,” says Abu Bilal, a farmer who lives next door.
He’d been ordered to leave his home when construction on the villa started and he’d only dared to return when the regime fell. “I was honestly shocked when I found out about the drugs here, about these scary operations that were destroying the country. We didn’t know anything about this drug.”
Syria’s neighbours had long warned of the pernicious effects on their home soil of the captagon it trafficked. Many of the regime drug lords were under US, EU and UK sanctions. Limiting Syria’s illicit captagon exports was to be a bargaining chip in Assad’s attempts at normalising relations with other Arab states.
It was, according to the World Bank, the most valuable sector of Syria’s war-shattered economy, worth between US$1.9bn (£1.5bn) and US$5.6bn (£4.4bn), with Syrian GDP valued at not much more – US$6.2bn (£4.9bn) in 2023.
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The factory produced chocolate and crisps above ground, narcotics below. Pills were stashed inside electrical switching systems, even plastic fruit. They carpeted the floors. Huge piles of captagon pills, worth anything from $2 to $20 each, depending on where they were sold.
“I fled the war to Egypt in 2014,” says factory owner Mohammad al Toot, who has just returned to Syria after a decade away.
“I found out while I was there that Amer Khayti took over my factory under the power of Maher Al Assad the terrorist, and alongside Bashar Al Assad and their gangs. They turned my food production facility into a drug operation. I went to the relevant authorities to claim my factory back but no one helped me.”
The 4th division may be gone but the captagon trade involves numerous different actors. Syria’s transition to narco state was relatively quick. Transitioning back out may not happen so fast.
World
Igor Kirillov: Who was ‘assassinated’ Russian general who helped deploy ‘barbaric’ weapons in Ukraine?
The head of Russia’s nuclear protection forces has been killed by a hidden bomb in Moscow.
Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov died in the street outside a block of flats about four miles (7km) southeast of the Kremlin.
The bomb was inside an electric scooter and was triggered remotely. It had the power equivalent to roughly 300g of TNT, Russian state news agency Tass reported, citing unnamed sources in the emergency services.
Lt Gen Kirillov’s assistant was also killed in the blast.
Kyiv ‘claims it killed senior Russian general’ – follow live
A source from Ukraine’s security services (SBU) told the Reuters news agency it was responsible for the killing. The source said Kyiv regarded the high-ranking official as a war criminal and an “absolutely legitimate target”.
Sky News has not independently verified these claims.
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Russian general killed in Moscow
Who was Igor Kirillov?
Lt Gen Kirillov had been the head of Russia’s nuclear protection forces since 2017 – a branch of the Russian army that included radiological, chemical and biological weapons.
The 54-year-old was born on 13 July 1970 in Kostroma.
He went on to attend Kostroma Higher Military Command School of Chemical Defence, graduating in 2007.
During his time there, between 1991 and 1995, he served as a platoon commander in the Western Group of Forces in Germany and the Moscow Military District.
After graduating, he occupied various posts in Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical defence forces, eventually becoming chief in 2017.
He was married and had two sons.
Link to nuclear weapons
The high-ranking Russian general led Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops.
According to the Russian defence ministry website, the force’s main tasks involve identifying hazards and protecting units from contamination.
Another listed task of the group is “causing loss to the enemy by using flame-incendiary means”.
The scene of the explosion in Moscow.
Pic: Reuters/Maxim Shemetov
Throughout his military career, Lt Gen Kirillov was known for helping to develop the TOS-2 Tosochka heavy flamethrower system.
Although not a nuclear weapon, the TOS-2 is designed to destroy buildings, bunkers, and field fortifications as well as light-armoured vehicles and motor vehicles of the enemy, according to the Russian defence ministry.
Why was he a target?
Ukraine’s intelligence service said Lt Gen Kirillov was responsible for “the massive use of banned chemical weapons” against the Ukrainian military.
According to the SBU there have been more than 4,800 uses of chemical weapons on the battlefield since February 2022, particularly K-1 combat grenades, “by order of Kirillov”.
The scooter that exploded, killing the Russian general
In May, the US State Department said it had recorded the use of chloropicrin – a chemical weapon first used in the First World War – against Ukrainian troops.
On Monday, Lt Gen Kirillov was sentenced in absentia by the SBU for the use of banned chemical weapons.
The service said more than 2,000 Ukrainian troops had suffered varying degrees of chemical poisoning since the start of the full-scale invasion.
“According to the investigation, the occupiers use dangerous chemicals mainly in the hottest areas of combat, where they try to hide the use of chemical agents under dense artillery fire,” the SBU said.
Russia has always denied using any chemical weapons in Ukraine and, in turn, has accused Kyiv of using toxic agents in combat.
Why was he sanctioned in the UK?
Lt Gen Kirillov was sanctioned by the UK government back in October for using “hazardous chemical weapons on the battlefield”.
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Are Russian sanctions working?
In a statement at the time, the UK government said Russian forces had openly admitted to the “widespread use of riot control agents and multiple reports of the use of the toxic choking agent chloropicrin”.
It said Kirillov was “responsible for helping deploy these barbaric weapons” and had also been “a significant mouthpiece for Kremlin disinformation, spreading lies to mask Russia’s shameful and dangerous behaviour”.
Read more:
Killing of Russian general Igor Kirillov will ring alarm bells
Zelenskyy and Putin ‘gotta make a deal’, Trump says
Other hits on Russia soil
Moscow has accused Ukraine of a string of high-profile assassinations on its soil, designed to weaken morale and punish those Kyiv says are guilty of war crimes.
Ukraine, which says Russia’s war against it poses an existential threat to the Ukrainian state, has made clear that it regards such targeted killings as a legitimate tool.
On 9 December – just over a week before Lt Gen Kirillov was killed – an explosive device was placed under a car in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Donetsk.
The device killed and was reportedly targeting Sergei Yevsyukov, the head of the Olenivka Prison, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died in a missile strike in July 2022.
One other person was injured in the blast.
Russia’s Federal Security Service said at the end of last week that a suspect had been arrested and charged with detonating the device.
Other suspected targets include:
Darya Dugina, a Russian TV commentator and the daughter of Kremlin-linked nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in a 2022 car bombing that investigators suspected was aimed at her father.
Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died in April 2023, when a statuette given to him at a party in St Petersburg exploded.
A Russian woman, who claimed that she presented the figurine on orders of a contact in Ukraine, was convicted in the case and jailed for 27 years.
Illia Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian lawmaker who fled to Russia, was shot and killed near Moscow in December 2023.
The Ukrainian military intelligence at the time lauded the killing, warning that other “traitors of Ukraine” would share the same fate.
For Ukraine – pitched against Russia’s larger and more powerful military – the use of unconventional tactics such as assassinations is seen as a vital way to fight back.
There is no official confirmation yet of who was behind the killing on Tuesday in Moscow of the head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical defence forces.
But the Reuters news agency claimed the attack – which Russian investigators say involved a remotely detonated bomb planted in an e-scooter – was carried out by Ukraine’s security service, the SBU.
Ukraine war latest: Reaction to general’s killing
Who was ‘assassinated’ general?
The scooter that exploded, killing the Russian general
Igor Kirillov in 2018.
File pic: AP
If proven, the ability of Ukrainian agents to kill a top commander in the Russian capital will be ringing alarm bells inside the Kremlin and is an embarrassing security breach.
The target of the bomb blast was Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov. His assistant was also killed.
A day earlier, the SBU accused the Russian general of using banned chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian security service said it had recorded more than 4,800 uses of chemical weapons on the battlefield since February 2022, particularly of one specific type of combat grenade.
A source told Reuters that Kyiv regarded Lieutenant General Kirillov as a war criminal and an “absolutely legitimate target”.
Read more from Sky News:
Zelenskyy and Putin ‘gotta make a deal’ – Trump
Inside the factories that bankrolled Assad
Moscow will surely seek to retaliate – whether or not the assassination is officially confirmed to be linked to Ukraine.
Either way, Kyiv will be bracing itself.
Donald Trump has said Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy have “gotta make a deal” to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The US president-elect said the conflict “has to stop” and that people were “dying at levels nobody has ever seen”.
He also claimed it could take “100 years” to rebuild Ukraine’s cities from the devastation of a full-scale Russian invasion that he said “should not” and “would not” have happened if he had been in office.
Latest updates on war in Ukraine
It comes as President Putin claimed in a speech on Monday that the conflict was turning in his country’s favour after nearly three years of intense fighting, which has resulted in Russia occupying large swathes of Ukraine’s eastern territory.
President Zelenskyy has long been opposed to any peace deal with Mr Putin that leaves Moscow in control of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia occupied in 2014.
However, speaking exclusively to Sky News last month, suggested a ceasefire deal could be struck if the territory he controls could be taken “under the NATO umbrella” – allowing him to negotiate the return of the rest later “in a diplomatic way”.
Russia-Ukraine latest: Follow for updates
Vladimir Putin at a meeting at Moscow’s national defence control centre. Pic: Sputnik/Reuters
‘It’s got to stop’
Mr Trump won a second White House term last month following a campaign in which he claimed he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in just “one day”.
On Monday, at a news conference at his Mar-a-Largo home in Florida, he repeated his desire to see an end to the fighting.
“Gotta make a deal,” Mr Trump said, before saying he would talk to Mr Putin and Mr Zelenskyy about bringing the conflict in Ukraine to an end.
He also said he had been shown pictures of body-strewn battlefields that reminded him of some of the grisly photographs from the 1861-1865 American Civil War.
“It’s got to stop,” he added.
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Zelenskyy on how ceasefire could work
Mr Trump did not give a direct answer when asked whether he believed Ukraine should cede territory to Russia as part of a negotiated settlement to end the war.
‘A turning point’
Earlier, Russia’s president made a speech at a defence meeting in which he suggested that a large number of men signing up for the country’s military voluntarily showed the tide of the Ukraine war was turning in Moscow’s favour.
“I would like to point out that the past year was a landmark year in achieving the goals of the special military operation [in Ukraine],” Mr Putin told top generals at the meeting in Moscow.
“Russian troops have a firm grip on the strategic initiative along the entire line of contact,” he said.
Around 427,000 troops signed army contracts this year, up from roughly 300,000 the year before, according to Russia’s defence ministry.
Speaking about this figure, Mr Putin said: “This flow of volunteers is not ending. And thanks to this… we are seeing a turning point on the frontline.”
Read more from Sky News:
Seven tourists taken to hospital in Fiji
Deadly cyclone hits French island
Russia has been making small gains into Ukrainian territory in recent months, reportedly at great human cost.
However, according to open source maps, Russian troops are now advancing at the fastest pace since the early days of its invasion in 2022.
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