Iraq seizes 25,000 captagon pills at school under construction in Anbar province

June 28 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Iraqi authorities have announced this Wednesday the seizure of 250,000 captagon pills on the grounds of a school under construction in the city of Ramadi, located in the province of Anbar (west), amid a spike in trafficking of this amphetamine in the region for nearly a decade.

The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior has indicated in a statement published on its website that “heroes of the anti-drug force” have also seized a kilogram of hashish in this same place, without any information on detainees for the moment.

In this sense, he has emphasized that the Ramadi Police “has initiated the necessary legal measures, in line with judicial decisions, to complete the arrest process of those involved in this crime.”

The Iraqi authorities have increased their anti-drug operations in recent months, including the arrest in mid-month of a trafficker in Nineveh (north), an operation in which 44,000 captagon pills were seized.

Likewise, Iraqi forces intercepted a shipment with more than three million captagon pills in March in an operation near the border with Syria, in which it was one of the main operations of its kind, focused on one of the largest routes trafficking of this drug in the region.

On May 1, Jordan hosted a meeting between several foreign ministers from Arab countries -including the Syrian, Faisal Mikdad-, in which Damascus promised to “strengthen cooperation” to fight drug trafficking and smuggling, within the framework of the work for the reintegration of Syria after more than a decade of isolation.

In this sense, the Syrian authorities were willing to cooperate with Jordan and Iraq to identify the sources of production and distribution of narcotics across their borders, in the midst of the increase in the flow of captagon trafficking in the context of the war that broke out. in 2011 in the Arab country.

Just two months earlier, the US government announced sanctions against six people, including two cousins ​​of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, accused of drug trafficking, specifically captagon.

Washington then explained that the sanctions “also underscore the important role of Lebanese drug traffickers, some of whom maintain ties to Hezbollah, in facilitating the export of captagon”, before specifying that “it is estimated that the trade in captagon has become a multi-billion dollar illegal company.”