Leila Molana-Allen:
Damascus, the epicenter of Bashar al-Assad’s web of control. Now his regime’s carefully guarded secrets are being unlocked.
We’re driving up into the mountains on the outskirts of Damascus, heading for a large Captagon facility that rebel fighters discovered when they took the city.
As we pull up outside an unremarkable warehouse, you would never know it was the lifeblood of an organized crime network. The only sign of anything amiss here are the rebel fighters stationed outside, and empty bullet casings scattered across the parking lot. A fighter leads us into the darkness.
We’re inside a cavernous basement of a former food factory, and when you walk inside, suddenly in front of you, pallets full of Captagon packed and ready to be smuggled, and there it is. That’s a Captagon pill, and those two little semicircles mark it.
This former corn chip factory was seized and repurposed after the owner fled five years ago, now, in place of corn and flavorings, bags of chemicals stacked along the walls.
This is the room where they actually made the pills. You can see it was hastily abandoned because some of this liquid from the mixture of chemicals is still drying in some of the pots. Come over here. This is a pallet with the little shapes into which they would pour the mixed chemicals and harden the pills.
Against the walls, bunks, where workers slept here in shifts to produce high quantities of the drug at speed. Factories like this have been found across Syria. This is one of the largest. The rebels who discovered this production facility think there are at least 2.5 million pills just in this room.
There are millions of dollars’ worth of drugs stacked on these pallets, and this is how they were smuggling it. This is a household voltage regulator. When you open it up, there’s a drum inside. But break through and, inside that drum. Captagon pills.
Abu Rashid, one of the HTS fighters guarding the factory, says they weren’t surprised to find such quantities.
Abu Rashid, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham Fighter (through interpreter): What he’s done here is produce drugs to destroy a whole generation of people just to increase his own wealth and his power.
