As-SuwaydaSweida’s Captagon trade survived Assad with Israeli backing.
Israel backed Druze militias to hold Sweida as a buffer against Damascus; trafficking into Jordan rose 325%, Syria Weekly data show.
Jordan has struck Sweida 5 times since Assad’s fall and has no political lever to stop the trade.
Sources: New Lines Magazine
WHAT CAPTAGON IS
Captagon is the street name for counterfeit fenethylline pills — a stimulant cocktail typically built around amphetamine, caffeine, and theophylline. The original pharmaceutical was banned in most of the world by the 1980s; the name survived because the brand recognition did.
THE ASSAD-ERA INDUSTRY
Under Bashar al-Assad, Captagon production scaled from a cottage trade into Syria's largest export by value — estimated in the multi-billions annually. The Fourth Armoured Division, commanded by Maher al-Assad, ran industrial-scale labs out of Latakia and the Qalamoun. Sanctions had collapsed the formal economy; the pills were what was left.
WHY SWEIDA
Sweida is the Druze heartland in southern Syria, perched on volcanic highlands above the Jordanian border. Smuggling routes here are old — the Hauran plateau funneled grain, then hashish, then weapons, now pills. The terrain is broken basalt: easy to cross on foot, impossible to fence.
THE DRUZE COMPACT
The Druze are a heterodox offshoot of Ismaili Shi'ism, esoteric enough that their full theology is restricted to initiates. Spread across Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Israeli-occupied Golan, the community has survived by playing every regional power against the next — serving in the IDF in Israel, the SAA in Syria, the LAF in Lebanon. Loyalty runs to the community, not the state.
WHY ISRAEL BACKS THEM
After Assad's fall in December 2024, Israel moved to prevent any successor — Islamist or otherwise — from consolidating southern Syria. Backing the Druze militias creates a buffer along the Golan that no Damascus government can easily dislodge. The same playbook Israel ran in southern Lebanon from 1976 to 2000 with the South Lebanon Army.
JORDAN'S BIND
Captagon flows hit Jordan first — the kingdom has lost soldiers in firefights with smugglers along the border and now carries out airstrikes inside Syrian territory. But Jordan cannot pressure the militias politically: the militias' patron is Israel, with which Amman holds a cold but binding 1994 peace treaty. The trade is structurally protected by the same architecture that keeps the regional peace.