Member of the Syrian Opposition Coalition’s (SOC) political committee, Abdelbaset Abdullatif, welcomed the bill submitted by members of the US House of Representatives to target the Assad regime’s e production and trafficking of the drug Captagon. He said that the Assad regime is now flooding global markets with this narcotic drug with the aim of refurbishing its coffers with hard currency.
Abdullatif stressed that the Assad regime, which has been fighting the Syrian people with all weapons for eleven years, does not pose a threat to Syria only, but also to regional countries after it recruited militias to manufacture drugs and smuggle them to neighboring countries.
The bill calls on the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Director of National Intelligence, and the heads of other appropriate Federal agencies to provide to the appropriate congressional committees a written strategy to disrupt and dismantle narcotics production and trafficking and affiliated networks linked to the regime of Bashar al-Assad 180 days after the date of the enactment of the act.
The bill indicated that the strategy should aim to target, disrupt, and degrade networks that directly or indirectly support the narcotics infrastructure of the Assad regime, particularly through diplomatic and intelligence support to law enforcement investigations and to build counter narcotics capacity to partner countries through assistance and training to law enforcement services in countries, other than Syria, that are receiving or transiting large quantities of Captagon.
The bill also calls for targeting individuals and entities directly or indirectly associated with the narcotics infrastructure of the Assad regime.
Moreover, the bill calls for developing a strategy for mobilizing a public communications campaign to increase awareness of the extent of the connection of the Assad regime to illicit narcotics trade.
International and regional experts have previously described Syria as a “narco-state” and a “Captagon Republic” after the Assad regime became the world’s biggest producer of Captagon.
(Source: SOC’s media department)
