Selma Mhaoud, Sana Sbouai, Ahmed Ashour and Ali Al Ibrahim, Captagon Drug Networks Adapt and Survive in Middle East After Assad's Fall, OCCRP with ARIJ and SIRAJ, 22 September 2025; and Mariam Shenawy, UN Says Assad's Fall Disrupted Syria's Captagon Production, OCCRP, 22 December 2025, reporting a UNODC research brief
Source ID
SRC-234
Citation
Selma Mhaoud, Sana Sbouai, Ahmed Ashour and Ali Al Ibrahim, Captagon Drug Networks Adapt and Survive in Middle East After Assad's Fall, OCCRP with ARIJ and SIRAJ, 22 September 2025; and Mariam Shenawy, UN Says Assad's Fall Disrupted Syria's Captagon Production, OCCRP, 22 December 2025, reporting a UNODC research brief
Investigative reporting; and reporting of a United Nations research brief
Hierarchy tier
4
Published
2025
Accessed
2026-08-17
Snapshot
Retrieved 17 August 2026 from occrp.org, HTTP 200
Claims
CH6 the captagon enforcement record and whether the trade has ended
Status
READ
Version history
The register keeps changing after the book is fixed in print. Each entry below was added to this row in the order shown.
READ 17 August 2026 AND IT REPLACES THE CHAPTER'S UNVERIFIED ENFORCEMENT DETAIL WITH SOURCED COUNTS. FROM THE UNODC RESEARCH BRIEF AS REPORTED 22 DECEMBER 2025: production has 'drastically changed'; SINCE DECEMBER 2024 THE TRANSITIONAL GOVERNMENT HAS DISMANTLED 15 INDUSTRIAL-SCALE LABORATORIES AND 13 SMALLER STORAGE FACILITIES; around 80 PER CENT of the drug seized in the Middle East BETWEEN JANUARY 2019 AND NOVEMBER 2025 originated in Syria; since December 2024 authorities across the Arab region have seized AT LEAST 177 MILLION TABLETS, roughly 30 TONNES; UNODC warns that stockpiles produced in the Assad era could 'sustain supply for a couple of years'; and traffickers 'continue to explore new routes and are increasingly using diversion and repackaging points', including in Western and Central Europe and North Africa. THE BRIEF IS NOT FINISHED. The research is ongoing and IS EXPECTED TO BE COMPLETED IN JUNE 2026, which is itself the chapter's point about what a compliance officer can and cannot establish. THE BRIEF ITSELF IS NOT OPENED; this is OCCRP's account of it, and the chapter attributes it that way. Untried route: the UNODC publication page for the brief. THE GOVERNMENT CLAIM AND ITS CONTRADICTION, both in the September feature: in June 2025 Syria's interior minister ANAS KHATAB said on state television, 'We can say that there no longer is any factory that produces Captagon in Syria'; the claim was followed by a string of high-profile seizures including 500 KG OF PRECURSOR CHEMICALS FOUND OUTSIDE DAMASCUS in September 2025, and production and trade continue PARTICULARLY IN PARTS OF SYRIA NOT YET UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE TRANSITIONAL ADMINISTRATION. NOT OPENED, AND THEREFORE DROPPED FROM THE CHAPTER'S LIST OF ASSESSMENTS: the Stimson Center piece of 2025 on the fragmented captagon industry. Two routes tried and failed on 17 August 2026, stimson.org direct by curl and by the fetch tool, both HTTP 403, and the Wayback Machine, HTTP 429 then 503. The chapter now names only the assessments this process has opened.
DEMOTED 17 AUGUST 2026, AND THIS AMENDMENT IS LATE. The v4 correction pass asserted in four places, its REGISTER_AMENDMENTS block, its manifest, the v4 change report section 5 and the commit message of b1ca2ca, that this row had been amended in that pass. IT WAS NOT TOUCHED. The v4 diff review established it at its finding B3 by reading the row and by running git show against the commit, which adds four rows and modifies none. THAT IS A CLAIM ABOUT WORK THAT NOBODY DID, which is the class D-069 exists for and the fourth such breach this project has recorded. WHAT IS NOW TRUE OF THIS ROW. THE BRIEF ITSELF IS OPEN AT SRC-239, read in full on 17 August 2026, and the chapter cites the primary. SO THE NARROWING THIS ROW IMPOSED IS WITHDRAWN: the instruction above that the brief is not opened and that the chapter must attribute the counts as OCCRP's account NO LONGER HOLDS, and a later pass must not read it as a bar. THE UNTRIED ROUTE NAMED ABOVE, the UNODC publication page for the brief, WAS EXECUTED ON 17 AUGUST 2026 AND IS CLOSED. THIS ROW NO LONGER SUPPORTS THE COUNTS, and the reason matters: its rendering of the eighty per cent as 'around 80 PER CENT of the drug seized in the Middle East' is OCCRP's paraphrase and NOT the brief's measure. The brief says '80 percent of captagon SEIZURES REPORTED across the region indicated the Syrian Arab Republic as the country of origin', referenced to UNODC Individual Drug Seizures, which counts seizure records and not quantity. The v4 diff review found at its B1 that the chapter printed the paraphrase's denominator, and this row is where that denominator came from. RETAINED FOR WHAT ONLY IT CARRIES: the interior minister's statement of June 2025 and the September 2025 precursor seizure outside Damascus, both from the OCCRP feature of 22 September 2025.
PUBLIC ADDRESS RECOVERED 31 AUGUST 2026 from the publisher's own canonical or og:url declaration inside the archived capture, or from another field of this row, and NOT from a fresh retrieval. The address is what the publisher stated the document's location to be at the time this project captured it; it has not been re-fetched since. Recorded so the works cited head-note count can move and so a reader has a route.