DAMASCUS: The Yarmouk refugee camp outside Damascus was considered the capital of the Palestinian diaspora before the war in Syria reduced it to row after row of blasted out buildings where there were once falafel stands, pharmacies and mosques.
Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp has been all but abandoned since 2018. The buildings that were not destroyed by bombs were demolished by the government or stripped by thieves. Those who wanted to return to rebuild their homes were stymied by Kafkaesque bureaucratic and security requirements.
But bit by bit, the camp’s former occupants have trickled back. After the Dec. 8 fall of former Syrian President Bashar Assad in a lightening offensive by opposition forces, many more hope they will be able do so.

At the same time, Syria’s Palestinian refugees — a population of about 450,000 — are unsure of their place in the new order.
“The new Syrian leadership, how will it deal with the Palestinian issue?” said Palestinian ambassador to Syria Samir Al-Rifai. “We have no information because we have had no contact with each other so far.”
Days after Assad’s government collapsed, women walked in groups through the streets of Yarmouk while children played in the rubble. Motorcycles, bicycles and the occasional car passed between bombed-out buildings. In one of the less heavily damaged areas, a fruit and vegetable market was doing brisk business.
Some people were coming back for the first time in years to check on their homes. Others had been back before but only now were thinking about rebuilding and returning for good.
Ahmad Al-Hussein left the camp in 2011, soon after the beginning of the anti-government uprising-turned-civil-war. A few months ago, driven by rising rents elsewhere, he came back to live with relatives in a part of the camp that was relatively untouched.
He is now hoping to rebuild his home in a building that was reduced to a hollowed-out shell and marked for demolition.
Under Assad’s rule, getting permission from security agencies to enter the camp “wasn’t easy,” Al-Hussein said. “You would have to sit at a table and answer who’s your mother, who’s your father, and who in your family was arrested and who was with the rebels. … Twenty-thousand questions to get the approval,”
He said people who had been reluctant now want to return, among them his son, who fled to Germany.
Taghrid Halawi came with two other women on Thursday to check on their houses. They spoke wistfully of the days when the streets of the camp used to buzz with life until 3 or 4 a.m.
“You really feel that your Palestine is here, even though you are far from Palestine,” Halawi said. “Even with all this destruction, I feel like it’s like heaven. I hope that everyone returns, all the ones who left the country or are living in other areas.”
Yarmouk was built in 1957 as a Palestinian refugee camp but grew into a vibrant suburb where many working-class Syrians settled. Before the war, some 1.2 million people lived in Yarmouk, including 160,000 Palestinians, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. Today, it houses some 8,160 Palestinian refugees who remained or have returned.
Palestinian refugees in Syria are not given citizenship, ostensibly to preserve their right to go back to the homes they fled or were forced from during the 1948 creation of the state of Israel and where they are currently banned from returning.
But in contrast to neighboring Lebanon, where Palestinians are banned from owning property or working in many professions, in Syria, Palestinians historically had all the rights of citizens except the right to vote and run for office — a negligible matter given that the outcome of Syrian elections was largely predetermined.
At the same time, Palestinian factions have had a complicated relationship with Syrian authorities. Former Syrian President Hafez Assad and Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat were bitter adversaries. Many Palestinians were imprisoned for belonging to Arafat’s Fatah movement.
Mahmoud Dakhnous, a retired teacher who returned to Yarmouk to check on his demolished house, said he used to be frequently called in for questioning by the Syrian intelligence services.
“Despite their claims that they are with the (Palestinian) resistance, in the media they were, but on the ground the reality was something else,” he said of the Assad dynasty.
In recent years, the Syrian government began to roll back the right of Palestinians to own and inherit property.
As for the country’s new rulers, “we need more time to judge” their stance toward Syria’s Palestinians, Dahknous said.
“But the signs so far in this week, the positions and proposals that are being put forward by the new government are good for the people and the citizens,” he said.
Yarmouk’s Palestinian factions tried to remain neutral when Syria’s civil war broke out, but by late 2012, the camp was pulled into the conflict and different factions took opposing sides.
Since the fall of Assad, the factions have been angling to solidify their relationship with the new government. A group of Palestinian factions said in a statement Wednesday that they had formed a body, headed by the Palestinian ambassador, to manage relations with Syria’s new authorities.
The new leadership — headed by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, an Islamic militant group — has not officially commented on the status of Palestinian refugees or regarding its stance toward Israel, which the previous Syrian government never recognized.
The Syrian interim government on Friday sent a complaint to the UN Security Council denouncing the incursion by Israeli forces into Syrian territory in the Golan Heights and their bombardment of multiple areas in Syria. But HTS leader Ahmad Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed Al-Golani, has said the new administration does not seek a conflict with Israel.
Al-Rifai said the new government’s security forces had entered the offices of three Palestinian factions and removed the weapons that were there, but that it was unclear whether there had been an official decision to disarm Palestinian groups.
“We are fully aware that the new leadership has issues that are more important” than the issue of Palestinian refugees, he said, including “the issue of stability first.”
For now, he said, Palestinians are hoping for the best. “We expect the relationship between us to be a better relationship.”
 

LONDON: For more than a decade, the illegal drug Captagon has been mass produced in Syria, in laboratories either run by or with the blessing of a regime hard hit by Western sanctions and desperate to generate revenue.

The scale of the trade, targeted mainly at young people in the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, was revealed last year in an Arab News expose produced in collaboration with the New Lines Institute.

A cheaply made form of amphetamine, Captagon has been flooding into countries of the Middle East for more than a decade, causing social harm on an unprecedented scale.

Embossed with its distinctive twin half moons logo, which gives the drug its Arabic street name, “Abu Hilalain,” or Father of the Two Crescents, the pills are easy to make, readily available, and relatively cheap to buy.

On Dec. 4, the New Lines Institute in Washington launched a unique interactive online tool designed to help researchers and global law enforcement agencies research, track, and understand the scale and complexities of the trade.

Just days after the launch of the project, the Syrian regime, which had been locked in a grinding civil war with armed opposition groups for almost 14 years, suddenly collapsed.

In the early hours of Sunday, Dec. 8, President Bashar Assad and his family fled to Moscow, where their Russian allies granted them asylum.

Since then, multiple Captagon laboratories have been overrun in areas formerly controlled by the Syrian government, with raw materials, machinery, packaging and countless thousands of pills found abandoned in haste.

But no one should think for one moment that the collapse of the Assad regime means the end of the curse of Captagon, according to Caroline Rose, director of the Strategic Blind Spots Portfolio at the New Lines Institute.

“We are going to see a shift in the trade now that Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and a lot of communities in Syria have started to disassemble Captagon production sites and incinerate Captagon pills,” she told Arab News.

In his victory speech at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on Monday, HTS leader Abu Mohammed Al-Golani made a specific point of condemning the drug and Assad’s part in its production.

The ousted president, he said, had caused the country to become “a major Captagon factory in the world, and today Syria is being cleansed of it.”

It is “very clear that if you are a Captagon manufacturer who did not flee with the regime, you are now in trouble, Rose said.

“But I think what we’re going to see now is overspill, what people often call the ‘balloon effect.’ Production is being squeezed inside Syria, but we are going to see the emergence of larger-scale Captagon production facilities in a few countries where alarm bells have already been ringing.”

Authorities across the region have frequently reported seizures of the pills, intercepted at ports, airports, and border crossings, in an ongoing battle of wits with smugglers resorting to increasingly ingenious methods.

The New Lines Institute’s Captagon Trade Project, the product of years of research, is the first time that information about all reported global seizures of the drug, showing the sheer scale of the trade, can be accessed in one place.

And clues to the changing profile of the Captagon trade in the months leading up the regime’s collapse can be found in the project’s data, which reveal that production facilities have been popping up in countries including Iraq, Lebanon and Turkiye.

In Lebanon, the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia, under intense pressure from Israel, “has an incentive to build up its own financial reserves, and Captagon is an easy way to do that,” Rose said.

A couple of Captagon labs were found earlier this year in Turkiye, a country where “we had not seen labs in a very long time.” Production facilities have even been found as far away as Europe, in Germany and the Netherlands.

In all these cases, it was certain that governments were not involved in the trade, according to Rose. “Syria was a very interesting and rare case where we did see the involvement of so many high-level officials in the regime, implicated in Captagon production and trafficking,” she said.

While Assad himself carefully distanced himself from the trade, his brother Maher was heavily implicated with production and smuggling efforts in his role as commander of the Fourth Armored Division, a military unit whose primary mission was to protect the Syrian regime from internal and external threats.

Quite where he is now remains uncertain.

“I have heard that Maher and his Fourth Division commanders made their way through Iraq to Iran and are now in Tehran,” Rose said.

“However, other reports say HTS has found and detained him. That’s not confirmed yet. But if Maher is still there, it’s likely that a lot of members of the regime’s Captagon organization are also still in Syria.”

Either way, there is now “an assumption that this is the end of Captagon, but it’s not. We need to keep in mind that over the past two years Captagon production had already started to trickle outside of Syria.

“For the longest time, regime-held Syria was the hub of Captagon production. Then we started to see labs being seized in southern and northern Iraq and even in Kuwait, which is interesting and makes sense. They were starting to build this bridge through Iraq to get closer to destination markets in the Gulf.”

At the same time, there were signs that the regime was cracking down on the Captagon trade — or, rather, pretending to — as revealed by the comprehensive seizure data in New Lines Institute’s online mapping tool.

“We saw the regime’s incentive to normalize relations with the Gulf states, and recognition that it needed to be seen to be cracking down on this trade, while quietly still reaping the economic benefits,” Rose said.

“For that reason, we think, in the past year we have seen the supply of Captagon — or, at least, what was seized — decrease dramatically, especially in Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which were the two targets for normalization discussions for the regime.

“We have cause to believe that the flow of Captagon was actually halted by the regime. They were stepping on the hose to create the appearance that they had stopped Captagon production, in the hope that it would bring the Gulf states to the table.

“In fact, as we’ve seen with the finds in Syria over the past few days, they seem to have been stockpiling the drug. Most likely later on they would have flooded the market.”

Sandwiched between Syria and Saudi Arabia, Jordan has long borne the brunt of smuggling attempts orchestrated by the Syrian military and Iran-backed militias operating in the south of Syria. It has, for many years, been a key battleground in the fight to stem the tide of the drug.

Over the past few months, however, there have been telltale signs of changes in the nature of attempts to smuggle Captagon through Jordan to Saudi Arabia and beyond. “Unusually, we’ve not seen any seizures in Jordan since early November,” Rose said.

“Typically, around this time of the year we would see an uptick in Captagon there, not only in smuggling incidents, but also in clashes along the border, because that’s when the wintry conditions start to set in, creating conditions that make it perfect for a smuggler to bypass surveillance systems.”

In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, the most recent recorded seizure was on Dec. 7 at the Al-Wadiah border crossing with Yemen. The two before that were both on Nov. 30, at the checkpoint on the King Fahd Causeway to Bahrain and on the other side of the country at the Port of Duba on the Red Sea.

“One was about 200,000 pills, the other one 280,000, so nothing major,” Rose said. “What we’ve noticed is that the number of seizures is increasing, but the sizes of the consignments are dwindling.”

In other words, smugglers are making more frequent runs, but with smaller batches of pills, which implies smaller players smuggling overland, rather than major, connected players shipping in bulk via sea.

Whatever HTS chief Al-Golani might say, or even intend, Syria is not yet free of Captagon, according to Rose. “I am positive that there are actors who are picking up a few thousand pills and peddling them on the street,” she said.

“This is still a very lucrative trade. Syria is not out of the woods economically, and there will be many people who will want to try to make a profit.”

Made for about $1 and typically sold for 15 times as much, Captagon is an exceptionally profitable product, which is estimated to have earned the Syrian regime more than $2 billion per year.

“And at the end of the day, old habits die hard,” Rose said.

“For a lot of these individuals, not necessarily high-level regime officials, this has been their way of life for years, and so it’s going to be very difficult for any new government in Syria to convince these criminal actors to give up this source of revenue.”