“Among those arrested on charges of drug trafficking in the Kurdistan Region, there are a number of merchants and smugglers who hold Syrian nationality and tried to sell the pills here, but their efforts failed,” he said.
Captagon is an amphetamine-type stimulant that has been spreading across the Middle East, with Syria as the main supplier and Saudi Arabia as the primary consumer.
Since the collapse of the Assad regime, the HTS-led rebels have found Captagon warehouses and factories allegedly connected to Bashar al-Assad’s brother, Maher al-Assad.
Captagon sales served as the Assad government’s main source of foreign hard currency while under international sanctions, according to a November 2024 report by the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme.
With a global trade estimated at $5.7 billion in 2021, as much as 80% of the total Captagon pills may have come from Syria. Networks aligned to the Syrian government earned $2.4 billion per year from the trade of the drug, according to the report.
That trade is a growing concern for Iraq and the Kurdistan Region.
“In recent years, there has been an attempt to turn the Kurdistan Region into a center for Captagon to be marketed, but we have been able to prevent it in a very good way,” said Bibani.
The spokesperson explained that they are in constant coordination with the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and that they are taking extensive measures to further secure the borders.
According to Captain Bibani, 1,439 people have been arrested since the beginning of 2024. Of them, 677 are accused of using illicit drugs while 762 of them are accused of dealing, some of them are foreigners.
During the same period, the directorate seized more than 465 kilograms of narcotics, more than 45 kilograms of it in pill form, he said.
Drug dealing and usage in Iraq is rising at an alarming rate, despite strict governmental measures to combat the phenomenon.
