At the summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, though, all seemed to be forgotten – as if it had merely been a minor misunderstanding. Syria was readmitted with the appropriate pomp. "We stand together against the currents of darkness", said Assad, portraying the mass murder he committed to cling to power as a noble undertaking.
In Syria’s dictatorship, meanwhile, nothing has changed, with mafia-like structures still flourishing in the economy as well. Drug smuggling, in particular to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, continues apace – and all this despite hopes from Arab League member states that welcoming Damascus back into the group might slow down the illicit drug flows.
Instead, Syria’s ruling family is deeply involved in illegal business dealings. That is illustrated by the case of a Syrian executive whose activities have been uncovered by a team of Syrian and international journalists together with DER SPIEGEL. In early March 2023, the travel agency FreeBird Travel and Tourism announced on its website: "Hello Europe – we’re back." After more than a decade of isolation, the airline Air Mediterranean, flights on which accordingly could only be booked via FreeBird, was offering direct connections to Europe. The first flight from Düsseldorf to Damascus via Athens took place on June 24, and since then the airline has been servicing the route once a week.
The FreeBird website lists two offices, one in Dubai and another in Athens. The agency is actually registered in the Damascus Free Trade Zone, where no information about company owners is made public.
FreeBird’s chairman would have remained a secret – had he not gone public himself with the information: Mahmoud Abdullah Aldij, a major player in the transportation industry, both from and to Syria. On Facebook, Aldij presents himself as the head of FreeBird as well as a representative of the Syrian airline Cham Wings, which is on the U.S. sanctions list for transporting both militia fighters and munitions on behalf of the Syrian régime. But it seems that Aldij has made a name for himself in another transport sector as well: as a drug smuggler who, according to investigators, was involved in at least three large shipments of the synthetic stimulant Captagon to Libya. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) reported on the investigation into Aldij back in 2021.
In early December 2018, the Greek Coast Guard intercepted the ship Noka in the Mediterranean south of Crete as it was cruising at top speed, later finding more than six tons of hashish and 3.1 million Captagon tablets onboard. The street value of the pills, according to the Greek authorities, was around 100 million euros. The Noka had put to sea from the northern Syrian port of Latakia and was headed for Benghazi in Libya. The dramatic operation was the product of a lengthy investigation, with the Greeks, European investigators say, having been tipped off by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which has been intensively monitoring Captagon smuggling from Syria for many years.
As is the case in most such smuggling operations, the Captagon pills were carefully hidden in containers beneath false floors. According to OCCRP reporting, the Syrian company Altayr, based in Latakia, had booked the shipment of the containers. The company’s director and owner? Mahmoud Aldij, who has both Syrian and Libyan citizenship. His photo and birthdate on his Libyan passport match up with photos and personal information kept in Syrian records. After a tipoff from Greece, Libyan customs officials apparently searched storage facilities that had been rented by Aldij in Benghazi, where they also found large quantities of hashish and Captagon pills.
For his suspected involvement in the Noka drug smuggling operation, in addition to the discovery of additional illicit drugs in the Libyan port cities of al-Khums and Tobruk, Mahmoud Aldij was sentenced in absentia by an appeals court in Benghazi in July 2019 to death by firing squad. The online publication The New Arab published excerpts of the verdict on its website. In comments to DER SPIEGEL about the verdict from Benghazi, Aldij said that it was part of an intrigue and claimed that powerful Libyans had been trying to extort part of his business from him. "When I refused, I was threatened. The ruling is illegitimate and has been appealed. I am certain that a fair trial will soon take place." According to his statement, his employees were "brutally tortured. They confessed to things and actions we did not do. My name has been attacked through hideous media campaigns by my competitors." However no legal actions was taken against the respective article in The New Arab.
Still, despite the discovery of the drugs and the incontrovertible evidence turned up by the Greek investigation, the rather barbaric death sentence from Benghazi nevertheless seemed odd. The city is home to General Khalifa Haftar, the de-facto ruler of the eastern half of the civil war-torn country. Haftar maintains excellent contacts to Damascus, and Western investigators believe that he, too, is deeply involved in smuggling people, weapons and Captagon out of Syria. It is, in short, an unlikely place for a Syrian drug smuggler to be sentenced to death.
Either way, the Benghazi authorities don’t seem particularly set on carrying out the verdict: On his Facebook page, Mahmoud Aldij also claims to be the "exclusive representative for Libya" for Cham Wings, which U.S. officials believe to be deeply involved in operations carried out by the Syrian security apparatus, including the transport to Damascus of foreign mercenaries and money laundering at the behest of the military intelligence agency. Aldij doesn’t deny that he is a Cham Wings representative, but he added the word "exclusive", he says, "only for marketing reasons". He claims to have no ties to General Haftar.
The booming business with the production and export of Captagon brings in several billion euros in profit every year and has long since exceeded Syria’s legal exports. The Captagon trade is firmly in the hands of the dictator’s family. In an initial trial against those in charge of the foreign smuggling operation in a regional court in Essen, Germany, in 2022, the obviously central role of Maher Assad, who is the dictator’s brother and commander of the Fourth Army Division, became clear from witness statements and intercepted telephone calls. As the Essen case made evident, the division controls transportation to all of the country’s ports, collects money for export permits and also operates its own drug factories. It’s not that the leadership in Damascus simply stands by doing nothing, Joel Rayburn, the former U.S. special envoy for Syria, said at the time: "They are the cartel."
It is extremely unlikely that Mahmoud Aldij would have been able to ship large amounts of Captagon to Libya without the knowledge and permission of the rulers in Damascus.
The Greek family of Air Mediterranean’s majority owner also has – through a rather bizarre detour – ties to Syria’s leadership. The last shareholders' meeting lists the brothers Andreas and Fadi-Ilias Hallak as owners of a 51 percent stake in the airline. Their father George was received in June 2021 as a state guest by Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mikdad. According to reports from the state-owned Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), George Hallak traveled to Damascus as a special envoy to the president of Guyana, one of the smallest countries in South America. According to SANA, the two affirmed the continuation of bilateral cooperation between the two countries.
Air Mediterranean presents itself to its foreign customers as an apolitical, European airline. Even as its partner agency Freebird advertises direct flights from Damascus to European cities, the airline itself doesn’t explicitly mention connections from Damascus to cities in Europe. A spokesman for the Düsseldorf airport confirmed: "Air Mediterranean flies to Düsseldorf. From and to Athens. Damascus is never mentioned."
In May, Assad and his henchmen had high hopes of receiving more than just warm words from the wealthy Gulf monarchies. Damascus was looking for billions in aid to begin the process of rebuilding the destroyed, impoverished country – or at least the two-thirds of Syria over which the régime has regained control.
But the Arab League wasn’t focused on development aid. The hope was that by reaccepting Syria into the group, stability would improve to the point that millions of Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey would begin returning home.
In addition, they apparently also hoped to encourage Assad’s régime to put a stop to the illegal smuggling of Captagon pills from Syria, consumption of which has turned into a massive problem in Saudi Arabia and Jordan especially. Even before the summit, Jordan’s government made clear just how important the issue was: After being a primary driver in favor of bringing Syria back into the fold, Jordanian warplanes – just one day after the Arab League’s formal reacceptance of Syria – bombarded the estate of the most powerful drug smuggler in southern Syria, killing him and his family.
Now, four months later, it is clear that everything has turned out rather differently than expected. The political backing provided by the Arab League has encouraged Assad to resume his military offensive against those regions of Syria that have thus far been able to fend off his attacks. The northern Syrian province of Idlib, crammed with millions of residents and internally displaced persons, was bombed 60 times in just the first few days of September. In the Kurdish-controlled northeast, dozens of people have died in battles. Syria, it would seem, is further away from stability and the voluntary return of refugees than it has ever been in recent years.
And the country continues its long slide into economic purgatory. Before the summit in Jeddah, the black-market exchange rate of the Syrian pound stood at 7,500 to one U.S. dollar. Since then, it has fallen to 14,000:1. There have also been protests in the southern city of Suwayda after Damascus canceled fuel subsidies there in August. Suwayda is a stronghold of the Druze minority, which have long managed to retain a small degree of autonomy in exchange for loyalty to the Assad régime.
Meanwhile, Syria’s Captagon production continues apace. According to the U.S. analyst Charles Lister, deliveries of the drug with a street value of around a billion dollars were confiscated within three months this summer in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries in the region. Syria has become a mafia-like network with a flag.
The country is stuck in a vicious cycle. In order to secure loyalty, Assad’s régime has transformed the country’s already shrunken economy into a criminal conglomerate. Only those who support the dictator are allowed to take part. Syria was always home to plenty of corruption, to be sure, but today, there are no longer any rules at all, say business owners and executives who have left the country.
The Arab League’s decision to reaccept Syria into its ranks has done nothing to change the situation. On the contrary, Assad’s régime now feels empowered to resume its war and to allow the population in those areas under its control to sink further into poverty. Only those who are linked to or loyal to the ruling family are allowed to participate in the economy.
For a brief moment, it looked as though the protests in Suwayda might spread to Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. But that hasn’t yet happened. "Anyone who might demonstrate in the country has long since fled, been killed, been locked up or is too afraid", says one Syrian refugee.'
The FreeBird website lists two offices, one in Dubai and another in Athens. The agency is actually registered in the Damascus Free Trade Zone, where no information about company owners is made public.
FreeBird’s chairman would have remained a secret – had he not gone public himself with the information: Mahmoud Abdullah Aldij, a major player in the transportation industry, both from and to Syria. On Facebook, Aldij presents himself as the head of FreeBird as well as a representative of the Syrian airline Cham Wings, which is on the U.S. sanctions list for transporting both militia fighters and munitions on behalf of the Syrian régime. But it seems that Aldij has made a name for himself in another transport sector as well: as a drug smuggler who, according to investigators, was involved in at least three large shipments of the synthetic stimulant Captagon to Libya. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) reported on the investigation into Aldij back in 2021.
In early December 2018, the Greek Coast Guard intercepted the ship Noka in the Mediterranean south of Crete as it was cruising at top speed, later finding more than six tons of hashish and 3.1 million Captagon tablets onboard. The street value of the pills, according to the Greek authorities, was around 100 million euros. The Noka had put to sea from the northern Syrian port of Latakia and was headed for Benghazi in Libya. The dramatic operation was the product of a lengthy investigation, with the Greeks, European investigators say, having been tipped off by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which has been intensively monitoring Captagon smuggling from Syria for many years.
As is the case in most such smuggling operations, the Captagon pills were carefully hidden in containers beneath false floors. According to OCCRP reporting, the Syrian company Altayr, based in Latakia, had booked the shipment of the containers. The company’s director and owner? Mahmoud Aldij, who has both Syrian and Libyan citizenship. His photo and birthdate on his Libyan passport match up with photos and personal information kept in Syrian records. After a tipoff from Greece, Libyan customs officials apparently searched storage facilities that had been rented by Aldij in Benghazi, where they also found large quantities of hashish and Captagon pills.
For his suspected involvement in the Noka drug smuggling operation, in addition to the discovery of additional illicit drugs in the Libyan port cities of al-Khums and Tobruk, Mahmoud Aldij was sentenced in absentia by an appeals court in Benghazi in July 2019 to death by firing squad. The online publication The New Arab published excerpts of the verdict on its website. In comments to DER SPIEGEL about the verdict from Benghazi, Aldij said that it was part of an intrigue and claimed that powerful Libyans had been trying to extort part of his business from him. "When I refused, I was threatened. The ruling is illegitimate and has been appealed. I am certain that a fair trial will soon take place." According to his statement, his employees were "brutally tortured. They confessed to things and actions we did not do. My name has been attacked through hideous media campaigns by my competitors." However no legal actions was taken against the respective article in The New Arab.
Still, despite the discovery of the drugs and the incontrovertible evidence turned up by the Greek investigation, the rather barbaric death sentence from Benghazi nevertheless seemed odd. The city is home to General Khalifa Haftar, the de-facto ruler of the eastern half of the civil war-torn country. Haftar maintains excellent contacts to Damascus, and Western investigators believe that he, too, is deeply involved in smuggling people, weapons and Captagon out of Syria. It is, in short, an unlikely place for a Syrian drug smuggler to be sentenced to death.
Either way, the Benghazi authorities don’t seem particularly set on carrying out the verdict: On his Facebook page, Mahmoud Aldij also claims to be the "exclusive representative for Libya" for Cham Wings, which U.S. officials believe to be deeply involved in operations carried out by the Syrian security apparatus, including the transport to Damascus of foreign mercenaries and money laundering at the behest of the military intelligence agency. Aldij doesn’t deny that he is a Cham Wings representative, but he added the word "exclusive", he says, "only for marketing reasons". He claims to have no ties to General Haftar.
The booming business with the production and export of Captagon brings in several billion euros in profit every year and has long since exceeded Syria’s legal exports. The Captagon trade is firmly in the hands of the dictator’s family. In an initial trial against those in charge of the foreign smuggling operation in a regional court in Essen, Germany, in 2022, the obviously central role of Maher Assad, who is the dictator’s brother and commander of the Fourth Army Division, became clear from witness statements and intercepted telephone calls. As the Essen case made evident, the division controls transportation to all of the country’s ports, collects money for export permits and also operates its own drug factories. It’s not that the leadership in Damascus simply stands by doing nothing, Joel Rayburn, the former U.S. special envoy for Syria, said at the time: "They are the cartel."
It is extremely unlikely that Mahmoud Aldij would have been able to ship large amounts of Captagon to Libya without the knowledge and permission of the rulers in Damascus.
The Greek family of Air Mediterranean’s majority owner also has – through a rather bizarre detour – ties to Syria’s leadership. The last shareholders' meeting lists the brothers Andreas and Fadi-Ilias Hallak as owners of a 51 percent stake in the airline. Their father George was received in June 2021 as a state guest by Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mikdad. According to reports from the state-owned Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), George Hallak traveled to Damascus as a special envoy to the president of Guyana, one of the smallest countries in South America. According to SANA, the two affirmed the continuation of bilateral cooperation between the two countries.
Air Mediterranean presents itself to its foreign customers as an apolitical, European airline. Even as its partner agency Freebird advertises direct flights from Damascus to European cities, the airline itself doesn’t explicitly mention connections from Damascus to cities in Europe. A spokesman for the Düsseldorf airport confirmed: "Air Mediterranean flies to Düsseldorf. From and to Athens. Damascus is never mentioned."
In May, Assad and his henchmen had high hopes of receiving more than just warm words from the wealthy Gulf monarchies. Damascus was looking for billions in aid to begin the process of rebuilding the destroyed, impoverished country – or at least the two-thirds of Syria over which the régime has regained control.
But the Arab League wasn’t focused on development aid. The hope was that by reaccepting Syria into the group, stability would improve to the point that millions of Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey would begin returning home.
In addition, they apparently also hoped to encourage Assad’s régime to put a stop to the illegal smuggling of Captagon pills from Syria, consumption of which has turned into a massive problem in Saudi Arabia and Jordan especially. Even before the summit, Jordan’s government made clear just how important the issue was: After being a primary driver in favor of bringing Syria back into the fold, Jordanian warplanes – just one day after the Arab League’s formal reacceptance of Syria – bombarded the estate of the most powerful drug smuggler in southern Syria, killing him and his family.
Now, four months later, it is clear that everything has turned out rather differently than expected. The political backing provided by the Arab League has encouraged Assad to resume his military offensive against those regions of Syria that have thus far been able to fend off his attacks. The northern Syrian province of Idlib, crammed with millions of residents and internally displaced persons, was bombed 60 times in just the first few days of September. In the Kurdish-controlled northeast, dozens of people have died in battles. Syria, it would seem, is further away from stability and the voluntary return of refugees than it has ever been in recent years.
And the country continues its long slide into economic purgatory. Before the summit in Jeddah, the black-market exchange rate of the Syrian pound stood at 7,500 to one U.S. dollar. Since then, it has fallen to 14,000:1. There have also been protests in the southern city of Suwayda after Damascus canceled fuel subsidies there in August. Suwayda is a stronghold of the Druze minority, which have long managed to retain a small degree of autonomy in exchange for loyalty to the Assad régime.
Meanwhile, Syria’s Captagon production continues apace. According to the U.S. analyst Charles Lister, deliveries of the drug with a street value of around a billion dollars were confiscated within three months this summer in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries in the region. Syria has become a mafia-like network with a flag.
The country is stuck in a vicious cycle. In order to secure loyalty, Assad’s régime has transformed the country’s already shrunken economy into a criminal conglomerate. Only those who support the dictator are allowed to take part. Syria was always home to plenty of corruption, to be sure, but today, there are no longer any rules at all, say business owners and executives who have left the country.
The Arab League’s decision to reaccept Syria into its ranks has done nothing to change the situation. On the contrary, Assad’s régime now feels empowered to resume its war and to allow the population in those areas under its control to sink further into poverty. Only those who are linked to or loyal to the ruling family are allowed to participate in the economy.
For a brief moment, it looked as though the protests in Suwayda might spread to Homs, Aleppo and Damascus. But that hasn’t yet happened. "Anyone who might demonstrate in the country has long since fled, been killed, been locked up or is too afraid", says one Syrian refugee.'
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