Iraq intercepts 200,000 Captagon pills bound for border in Syria

Shafaq News- Baghdad/ Damascus

Iraq’s National Intelligence Service has dismantled an international Captagon drug trafficking network operating inside Syria, seizing more than 200,000 pills in a joint operation with Syrian security forces.

In a statement on Tuesday, the agency added that five members of the network were arrested while planning to smuggle “large quantities” of Captagon into Iraq in multiple batches through Syrian territory.

Authorities did not disclose the exact locations of the arrests. Iraq’s borders, particularly the western corridor that includes Al-Anbar province and the Al-Qaim border crossing with Syria, are a key route for Captagon trafficking into Iraqi cities and onward to Gulf markets, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The body earlier said Iraq’s Captagon seizures increased by nearly 3,380% between 2019 and 2023.

In December 2025, the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s General Directorate for Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Affairs unveiled a similar operation that also resulted in the seizure of 200,000 Captagon pills. Iraq’s Interior Ministry has detailed in previous statements that security forces dismantled 1,201 drug trafficking networks in total over the past three years, including 171 international groups, and seized more than 14 tons of narcotics nationwide.

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