Hezbollah’s smuggling highway on the Syria-Lebanon border continues. Hezbollah’s smuggling routes from Syria to Lebanon primarily involve weapons. On June 24, Syrian forces thwarted an attempt to smuggle weapons by a cell identified with Hezbollah in the town of Al-Qusayr, in the Homs sector near the Lebanese border. The truck used for smuggling contained guided anti-tank missiles of the “Kornet” type, two launchers, and several RPG rockets. On June 26, the Lebanese army thwarted another attempt to smuggle weapons in the Basibs area, in the Al-Harmal Valley in the Bekaa, near the Syrian border. It appears that as part of its recovery process and renewal of income sources, Hezbollah is resuming drug smuggling routes (captagon and hashish) in the opposite direction. Within 24 hours between June 27 and 28, Syrian security forces foiled two major drug smuggling attempts from the Lebanese border to the Damascus countryside.
On June 27, a smuggling convoy was seized in the Jarajir area, containing approximately 3 million captagon pills and 50 kg of hashish. On June 28, another smuggling convoy was seized in the same area, containing 500,000 captagon pills and 665 kg of hashish. Today’s Syria remains a central hub in the drug production industry, particularly for captagon, and a key origin point for drug smuggling worldwide. This persists despite the new Syrian regime’s efforts to combat the drug industry (at least according to the regime’s public statements). Before the fall of the Assad regime, at least 17 captagon production sites were identified by the Alma Center in Syria, primarily northwest of Damascus in the Al-Qalamoun region, near the Lebanese border. Most of these sites were linked to Hezbollah. Following the collapse of the Assad regime, it is highly likely that Hezbollah has relocated its captagon production infrastructure from Syrian territory to the Bekaa region in Lebanon.
