Last week, Iraqi authorities intercepted one of the largest shipments of the illegal drug, Captagon, they had ever stopped. Just over a ton of the pills — an amphetamine-like drug that’s highly addictive and popular with users in wealthy Gulf states — were found hidden in a truck heading over the Iraqi border from Turkey. It had apparently come from Syria.
Observers immediately asked: Why were such large shipments of Captagon still being discovered, several months after Syria’s authoritarian Assad regime was ousted?
