Iraqi security forces have seized more than a ton of captagon, an illegal stimulant, smuggled from Syria via Turkey, the interior ministry said on Sunday.
Ministry spokesman General Moqdad Miri said the Narcotics Directorate "seized a truck from Syria, bound for Iraq, via Turkey, transporting 1.1 tons" of the synthetic drug in tablet form.
The seizure was one of the largest in Iraq in recent years and consisted of seven million pills, a security official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
It was also the first such seizure announced since the toppling in December of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whose government was at the heart of the trade in areas he controlled, experts have said.
The drugs were transferred from a Turkish truck to an Iraqi truck near a border crossing between the two countries, according to video footage released by the interior ministry, which showed the pills hidden in a shipment of ironing boards.
Miri said there had been arrests, but did not elaborate on the number or nationality of those detained.
He said the seizure operation was mounted with the cooperation of security forces in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, which borders Turkey.
It also took place thanks to "very important information" provided by Saudi security forces, Miri added.
Captagon became Syria's largest export during the country's civil war that began in 2011.
In recent years Iraq and its neighbors, in particular the transit countries Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to boost cooperation in a bid to combat trafficking.
Saudi Arabia is a major market for addictive captagon.
Iraq in 2022 announced it had seized six million pills, and in 2024 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) said the country had experienced a "dramatic increase" in both the trafficking and use of captagon in the previous five years.
"In 2023 alone, authorities (in Iraq) seized a record-high 24 million captagon tablets—the equivalent of over 4.1 tons, with an estimated retail value of between $84 million and $144 million," a UNDOC report said.
It said that between 2019 and 2023, about 82 percent of the captagon seized in the Middle East originated from Syria, followed by Lebanon at 17 percent.
The new authorities in Damascus have announced the destruction of around 100 million captagon pills, but the trade persists, a diplomatic source who follows the issue said.
"Lower-ranking operators are showing resilience, adapting, and remaining in place despite political or security changes," the source said.
"It is therefore not surprising to see trafficking continue, whether through the sale of existing stockpiles or the establishment of new production."
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said that trafficking from Syria was ongoing and that there were still captagon factories operating in the country.
AFP
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