Syrian authorities on Thursday announced the seizure of around 9 million pills of the illegal amphetamine-like stimulant captagon that were heading for Turkey after a month-long operation.
The Syrian interior ministry said that “over 9 million captagon pills” were seized in the operation run jointly with its Turkish counterpart.
“Approximately 5 million of these pills were smuggled into Turkey, while the remaining quantity was intended for smuggling [to other countries],” the ministry posted on Telegram.
Turkish and Syrian forces tracked the smugglers for a month, the ministry said and arrested them in Aleppo.
It added that authorities in Syria would work “tirelessly to eradicate this dangerous scourge.”
Under the rule of former president Bashar al-Assad, captagon became Syria’s largest export during the civil war that began in 2011.
Since Assad’s ouster last December, the new Islamist authorities have discovered millions of captagon pills in warehouses and on military bases.
But drug smuggling persists, with neighboring countries occasionally seizing large quantities of captagon.
Iraqi security forces seized more than a ton of captagon smuggled from Syria via Turkey in March, and Jordan thwarted a smuggling attempt from Syria in April, confiscating “hundreds of thousands” of captagon pills.
Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani met with Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi in Amman in January.
Safadi said the kingdom was ready to work with Syria’s new authorities to tackle drugs and weapons smuggling across their shared 375-kilometer (230-mile) border.
© Agence France-Presse