Drones from Syria to Jordan transporting dangerous drugs

In the midst of civil war, drug trafficking is growing rapidly in Syria. The civil war country has become the largest drug producer in the Middle East and poses a problem for surrounding states.

Adjacent country Jordan has been greatly affected by the drug trade, which consists primarily of captagon. For months, the Jordanian government has been complaining about this problem and publicly raised the issue during the first official meetings between the two countries after years of silence.

The Jordanian army now announced Sunday that it had foiled a smuggling attempt by a drone loaded with drugs.

Jordan’s state news agency (Petra) quoted a Jordanian army source as saying, “Through surveillance and tracking, the flying object was controlled and subsequently shot down. During the assessment, an amount of narcotics was found on board.”

While the drug trade has been exploring increasingly creative avenues, Jordan has been tackling the problem militarily for months now. Three months ago, Jordanian warplanes bombed secret Captagon production factories in Syria’s As-Suwayda region. That included hitting 47-year-old Marai al-Ramthan, dubbed “Escobar of the Syrians” in Jordan. According to the report, Syria’s main drug smuggler was responsible for flooding Jordan and the Gulf states with thousands of shipments of captagon.

A joint committee was established on the 24th of July last month following the establishment of official diplomatic relations between Syria and Jordan to jointly address the drug problem.

The issue was also raised at the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia, where Bashar al-Assad was invited for the first time since the civil war broke out. Assad, however, said in a recent interview with Sky News Arabia that Syria was not responsible for the problem, but the countries that had instigated the chaos in Syria, thus dismissing responsibility.