Hezbollah’s role in the global drugs trade — the West Africa connection
October 09, 2021
When Saudi Arabia banned the import of Lebanese produce in April because these shipments were being abused to smuggle narcotics into the Kingdom, Hezbollah found itself with a problem.
Following the collapse of the Lebanese and Syrian economies, Assad family mafiosi and Hezbollah set about remodeling their nations as narco states — world production centers for the amphetamine-based drug Captagon, a favorite among partygoers and terrorist groups. Syria’s Captagon trade is estimated to be worth over a billion dollars a year.
Captagon production had become established in areas such as Homs and Aleppo, but given Syria’s extreme dysfunction, many major factories have been reconsolidating themselves along the Lebanon-Syria border, particularly in Hezbollah strongholds such as Qusair and the Bekaa Valley. Lebanon’s former Justice Minister and security chief, Ashraf Rifi, describes a “partnership between Hezbollah and the Syrian side in terms of manufacturing and smuggling” Captagon. This is in addition to Syria and Lebanon becoming favored routes for heroin, crystal meth and hashish.
Since the GCC shipping ban, Hezbollah has resorted to diverting these illegal shipments via transit states to obscure the country of origin, once again exploiting its connections with the worldwide Lebanese diaspora. West Africa has become a preferred option, with 450,000 Captagon pills turning up at a port in Lagos, discovered as a result of Saudi-Nigerian cooperation. GCC authorities have also discovered millions of Captagon pills in West African shipments of cocoa, with Syria almost certainly the original point of production.
This isn’t the first time Hezbollah has embroiled West Africa’s Lebanese communities in the narcotics trade. During the 2000s, Hezbollah and Iran found themselves with a different problem: Thanks to President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s outreach to Latin American states, Hezbollah began reaping billions of dollars from cocaine, but it had no means of repatriating these funds to Beirut and Tehran. It hit on an ingenious idea: Investing the money in tens of thousands of second-hand American cars that were then shipped to Benin, where hundreds of Lebanese expats set themselves up in the West African car market. The proceeds from these sales were then repatriated to Lebanon.
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The world shouldn’t wait for Lebanon’s compromised and dysfunctional justice system to solve this problem. Legal cases against a smattering of Lebanese drug-dealers are risible — people jailed for laundering a few hundred capsules! It would seem that the major players are trying to eliminate the small-scale competition.
By tackling this threat head on, the world not only prevents millions of lives being irreversibly ruined, but it can also prevent the funneling of billions of dollars of drug revenues into terrorism and paramilitarism. So why this international failure to address the fact that the Hezbollah-Tehran nexus has become by far the world’s most globalized network for criminality and terrorism?
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1944626