Photo: CSIS
Photo: iLab/CSIS
Jon Alterman: Christoph Reuter is an award-winning journalist with the German magazine, Der Spiegel. He's been reporting on the Middle East for more than 20 years, and he spent much of the last decade covering the conflict in Syria. Christoph, welcome to Babel.
Christoph Reuter: Thank you.
Jon Alterman: You've spent years in war zones in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and most recently, Ukraine. Have you ever been in a war zone where there wasn't smuggling and organized crime?
Christoph Reuter: Well for Ukraine, there is less smuggling and organized crime, but it's also a more clear-cut conflict with one country invading another country. Iraq, Syria, and Yemen had much more complicated theaters of conflict and civil war. For example, a dictator fighting against his own population, with warlords emerging in specific areas and basing their power on the loyalty of their ethnic or professional group. All of this facilitates smuggling and organized crime.
Jon Alterman: Is there something about insurgencies that lend themselves to organized crime, or something about organized crime that makes them want to insert themselves into insurgencies as people look for funding?
Christoph Reuter: It depends on what initiates the conflict. In the Sahel area, for example, there are well-established smuggling networks that claim they are now Islamic State of Maghreb or Al-Qaeda, although they were originally formed as a smuggling network. On the other hand, in Syria, rebels were desperately looking for funding and started smuggling gasoline. Most recently, Syrian rebels have gotten involved in Captagon smuggling. Captagon is an amphetamine drug that is produced in regime-held Syria.
The conditions also play a significant role. From a humanitarian perspective, a certain level of lawlessness can be better than a dictatorship, whose main target is to kill as many people as possible who are revolting against it. However, this degree of lawlessness creates military groups with various interests, like in the case of Ahrar al-Sham in Syria, looking to run a social network and become a replica of the state within the civil war. In other areas, groups are more business orientated.
Jon Alterman: What was ISIS's role in organized crime? Was there any group that ISIS wouldn't work with as it was trying to build financial support for its caliphate?
Christoph Reuter: The Islamic State, IS, had clear ideological rules and guidelines. For example, they banned the smoking of cigarettes and imposed the law strictly. Ironically, they were deeply involved in cigarette smuggling. They used the ban of cigarette smoking and smuggling to monopolize the cigarettes business for those who simply can't give up smoking and are willing to pay the equivalent of three Euros for a packet, which was 10 times the cost before they banned cigarettes.
IS brought in Armenian cigarettes from a company called Akhtamar. They chose the Armenian cigarettes, cigarettes from the most Christian country imaginable, because they were the cheapest cigarettes they could get from Turkish smugglers. In the end, IS was involved in basically any kind of smuggling, be it gasoline, fuel, cigarettes, or whatever would generate money.
Jon Alterman: Were they involved in drug smuggling as well?
Christoph Reuter: They were not involved in the production and export of Captagon. They were involved in purchasing Captagon, mostly to use it for their own fighters. There was no lucrative smuggling route IS could use to get Captagon from the regime area to somewhere else in Iraq.
This was mostly a wrong allegation made by Guardia di Finanza, an Italian military police focused on financial crimes and smuggling, when they confiscated the $1 billion load of Captagon in Salerno.
IS was involved in the consumption and purchasing of Captagon. There are numerous accounts of how they used it for fighters to make them more enthusiastic, but the smuggling was done by people from the regime.
Jon Alterman: How did Captagon become a major item for trade in the Middle East?
Christoph Reuter: It started with German chemists developing the predecessor of Captagon. In the 1960s, Captagon was a German brand name and then it was produced with a slightly different formula in Bulgaria in the Eastern bloc. Then Bulgarian chemists traveled to Lebanon and worked with Hezbollah, a pattern seen in other areas of military equipment. Bulgaria and Hezbollah got along pretty well, so Hezbollah in Lebanon started to produce this amphetamine with a slightly different formula, which they labeled Captagon because it was an introduced brand name.
From Lebanon, it moved to Syria in 2012 because being in a lawless area is better for those making Captagon. Syria also had an established pharmaceutical industry, which knew how to get the basic chemical substances, mostly imported from China and India, shipped to Beirut or Latakia, and then smuggled into Syria.
Captagon reached Syria during the war and was run mostly by the Assad family, who have always stayed in Latakia. There was a thriving drug smuggling business there, but this mostly consisted of marijuana and hashish. Assad realized that producing Captagon could be very lucrative because it was in high demand by various militias who use it to give the fighters the feeling of impunity and is in high demand in the rich Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, where the youngsters like it because it gives them a kick and keeps them away. This is a good thing for Saudi Arabia because many youngsters normally go out on the weekend at night because it is so hot during the day. Most activities, like shisha bars and driving circuits open at night. Captagon is the perfect drug for rich kids in Saudi and elsewhere, who would be willing to pay the equivalent of $10 per pill, which has production costs of maybe 30 to 50 cents maximum. This is how Captagon became big seven or eight years ago.
Jon Alterman: How big is the Captagon trade now?
Christoph Reuter: Several billion dollars, though it is difficult to get an idea of the overall amount because we have not managed fully to track the shipments of the basic chemicals.
The Syrian regime blatantly denies any involvement in it, although we could track some of the camouflage and some of the packing back to family members of Bashar al-Assad. Starting in 2015 or 2016, there were big seizures on ships that were used to bring tons of Captagon to European ports and then shipped to the Gulf Arab states. They had to go to European ports first because any ship that comes straight from Syria to any port in Saudi Arabia would be torn to pieces and checked thoroughly, while any ship coming from a European port, allegedly transporting machinery or regular goods would be superficially checked.
There were still so many seizures of these shipments and, according to sources we have in Jordan, the Syrian smugglers have shifted away from the big shipments to new smuggling that people are trying to cross the Jordanian or Iraqi border with smaller amounts which is more difficult to detect.
Jon Alterman: Are most of the end users in the Middle East, although the smuggling networks go through Europe, or is most of the intended use outside the Middle East?
Christoph Reuter: This giant detour to ship it to Europe is all intended to cover up the real origin. Some logistic officials of the smuggling networks booked the passage of container ships from Tartus or Latakia to Salerno, to Port Said or Athens, and then the container would be unloaded in the free port.
Then there was another booking that the container ship would be sent, for example, from Salerno to Athens and then to Saudi Arabia to confuse its real origin, which clearly shows that European ports were only meant as transit ports.
Jon Alterman: Do you think there's an intentional decision not to trade with Europe for fear that if you were trading into Europe then the Europeans would come down hard on the producers? The second question is whether Europeans are involved in this or is this an overseas Syrian network managing everything?
Christoph Reuter: There was one interesting court case here in Germany, where, for the first time, high-ranking logistic guys were brought to court because they were Syrians who had worked for years in the port of Latakia and had come to Germany with the big wave of refugees in 2015 and 2016.
The people who organized the smuggling are Syrians inside Syria or exiled Syrians, like the ones living in Germany or Romania, and to a smaller degree Lebanese Hezbollah or smugglers close to Hezbollah.
It's not getting into the European sphere, even in Salerno where a shipment was tipped off by the Camorra people to the police because they had the impression that someone was endangering their business.
For your second question, Syrian producers are not focusing on the European consumer market simply because the European market is full of all kinds of amphetamine, cocaine, and all kinds of drugs. It would be difficult to get a share within this market with a product that would not be in such high demand here.
If you like amphetamines, you have a variety of different amphetamines. There are amphetamines to dance all night or enhancers for specific purposes. There is also cocaine, but the specific effect of Captagon would not meet a very hungry audience. It wouldn't make sense to take this effort to get a market within Europe if you have a perfect market in the Middle East or Africa, where a lot of militias are available through smuggling routes from Libya.
Jon Alterman: You've described this as a multibillion-dollar business. Do you think there's anything that could make the Syrian government get out of the illegal drug business?
Christoph Reuter: Yes, bringing down the government. The government can exert a lot of pressure on the house of Saud, Saudi Arabians, and the Jordanians by holding the card of Captagon production and smuggling. They are getting something in exchange for promising to stop the trade; while at the same time, claiming that they have nothing to do with the trade so they can benefit from the trade. There is not much else Syria can export these days and oil and gas profits in Syria are mostly in the hand of the Kurds or Russian or Iranian companies.
Captagon is purely Syrian profits, so I don't see any reason why they should stop this. At the same time they can use it as a bargaining chip with the neighboring countries with a plausible deniability that although they have promised to stop it, they couldn't stop it completely.
Jon Alterman: You've described the Assad family's direct involvement in the Captagon trade. Are there other ways the Assad family is profiting from the war economy in Syria?
Christoph Reuter: We haven't tracked it down to the family itself, but, of course, it was the inner circle and the security apparatus who benefited enormously from this extremely cynical trade. The security apparatus used to make money by disappearing people and asking their relatives for $3,000 or $5,000. Over 100,000 people had relatives disappear. Sometimes it works, people were even released by bribing security officials, but very often the money just disappeared, and completely desperate family members would sell everything to secure the survival of their loved ones.
This business has mostly dried up because people have given up. This was one of the main businesses people within the inner circle grew obscenely rich with.
Jon Alterman: You've been going back and forth to Syria for many years. Do you think the war has changed the Assads or do you think it's merely revealed more starkly who the Assads are?
Christoph Reuter: It was a wake-up call for Bashar al-Assad, who grew up in an atmosphere that governing, running, looting, and owning Syria is acceptable.
According to people we talked to, in the first weeks and months, he was utterly surprised about the sudden resistance against the rule of a few clans and the 10 percent minority over the rest of the country. Over the course of the war, the paranoia of the Assads and the Alawite inner circle of power has reached new levels. They would do anything not to give up power or show any cracks. By now, in many parts of Sunni Syria, the Assad family and Alawites are hated so much for the cruelty of Assad's troops, and the security forces have committed to the idea that the fear is justified.
If they give up power, they would not be the well-established elder statesman, they would have to go back to the mountains and would be despised and hated by large parts of the Syrian population for another generation and would never come back to power.
In a way, it has shown the nature of any regime which tries to base its power on the poorest 10% minority of the population, which always creates conflict, so they have to take extreme measures to preserve the power.
Jon Alterman: You've described how Ukraine is a different kind of war because it's not about a small minority fighting to maintain its rule over a country or an insurgency and obviously there's Western support. But are there other lessons that you think the West should have learned from the conflict in Syria that it can apply to prosecuting conflict in Ukraine?
Christoph Reuter: Retrospectively, yes. Western inaction gave the Russian government the notion that they can send in their forces, take over the country, and decide the fate of Bashar al-Assad and Syria. To a large extent, this provides Russia assurances that this experience can be replicated and repeated in Ukraine. It was a mistake to let Syria bleed and to not bring down Assad's regime, because doing so would have been the only way to a new start.
By now, the Syrian conflict is an unsolved, frozen conflict. The reasons for the conflict have even been amplified and the fear of the dictator is bigger than the misery of people, but nothing has been solved.
It shows us that if you encourage people, that they can take what they want by force, they will not do it once, they will do it again, as Putin did with Ukraine. Looking back, Syria provides the lesson that the West should have acted more proactively.
Jon Alterman: Christoph Reuter, correspondent for Der Spiegel, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.
Christoph Reuter: Thank you.
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