Inside the drugs factory: How captagon is fuelling the war in Sudan

Middle East Eye

6 days ago

Deep in an industrial wasteland on the eastern bank of the Nile stand three unremarkable, half-finished buildings surrounded by a minefield.
For months, nearby residents were warned by paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters to stay away from this walled compound. A glance inside reveals why: machines and chemical products that the Sudanese authorities say were used to produce around 1,000 captagon pills an hour.
Fashionable with fighters and partygoers in the Middle East during the past decade, the cheaply produced and addictive amphetamine, which heightens concentration, increases physical stamina and induces euphoria, has been the scourge of Arab governments.
The RSF, according to security sources, either gives it away to its fighters to increase alertness and suppress hunger or sells it to civilians for profit.
Until December, Syria was the primary production and export hub for captagon. But the fall of Bashar al-Assad's government, which was heavily involved in the industry, exposed and shut down a raft of captagon laboratories and the routes used by its smugglers.
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Although captagon production may have been badly affected by the end of the Syrian civil war, 2,000km to the southeast, another conflict has been providing fresh opportunities.
How captagon is reaching Sudan
Earlier this year, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which has been at war with the RSF since April 2023, forced the paramilitaries from Khartoum and the capital's surrounding eponymous state.
The area around al-Jaili oil refinery, which is north of Khartoum Bahri, was among the first territories to be taken in the offensive.
And it was there, in February, that this captagon factory was discovered.
A satellite image from 14 April 2023 shows the walled compound. The inset shows the building containing the equipment and chemicals, taken from a video shot earlier this year (Google Earth/Sudan News/X screengrab)
The facility contains five machines. Two of those - a tablet press and an industrial mixer - had been in use when it was abandoned. A fine white residue lines parts of the tablet press. 'We also discovered pills inside it,' Major-General Jalal al-Din Hamza of the anti-narcotics police tells Middle East Eye.
According to Hamza, those tablets bore the hilelein, the double crescent symbol, which has become the unofficial trademark of illegal captagon production.
The other three machines were still packaged in wooden boxes and had not yet been used.
Beside the used tablet press is the crate that the machine appears to have arrived in. On one side, a paper shipping label suggests it was imported via Amass Middle East Shipping Services, a Dubai-based company. Entering the freight identifier number on the label into Amass' online tracking system yields no results.
The top row shows an industrial mixer and tablet press that were in use when the facility was discovered. The bottom row shows machines that had not yet been fully unpacked (Daniel Hilton/MEE)
MEE asked Amass Middle East Shipping Services for comment but did not receive a response. The RSF also did not respond to requests for comment.
Dubai is a major port for shipping along the Red Sea. The RSF is known to have close ties to the UAE. Although the UAE denies backing the RSF by providing it with weapons and other material assistance, there is mounting evidence that Emirati-supplied arms continue to enter Sudan.
MEE shared images of the machines with Caroline Rose, a captagon expert at the New Lines Institute, based in Washington.
"My biggest takeaway is that the equipment flagged in the photos is extremely similar to the baking/cooking/scientific equipment found at Syrian laboratories in the last year," she said.
'He was up all day and all night jumping'
Elsewhere in the compound is a large, dark, concrete room, carpeted by hundreds of packets of white powder.
The bags come in two kinds: one is labelled as veterinary food supplements, the other as electrolytes for animals. Both say they were produced in Syria and are not intended for human consumption.
MEE attempted to find any examples of the brand names on the packets that have been seen elsewhere, such as PropioTech and Technomix Plus, without success. The distributor listed on the packets, Hi Pharm Veterinary Medicines Co, does not appear on Syria's business registry.
Hi Pharm is listed as having a Yahoo email address, which MEE tried to contact, only for the message to bounce back. It also carries an address in Barzeh, a Damascus suburb, 'next to the Scientific Research Center'.
Sudanese police say they are investigating whether the ingredients listed on the packets - an array of vitamins and minerals - could be used to make captagon.
Italian authorities discover a huge shipment of captagon in Naples in July 2020 (AFP)
Research by MEE suggests otherwise, as none of the ingredients named are used to produce either amphetamine or theophylline - the two substances that make fenethylline, as captagon is also known.
Moreover, Rose notes, they are 'different (in terms of both the levels of vitamins and which ones are included) from traditional veterinary nutritional packets'.
The powder may be an example of dry captagon ingredients, known as precursor material, disguised as a veterinary food supplement or electrolyte and ready to be made into pills.
'Maybe they just dumped precursor materials into these packets and, you know, just essentially said: 'Hey, look, if it's tableted, it's tableted and no big deal,'' Rose says.
Captagon tablets often contain zinc, copper, caffeine and other materials that have found their way, intentionally or not, into the mix.
'I don't think that these syndicates really care about some of the additional chemical materials that are added,' Rose adds.
'They're just looking to crush up materials and make pills. I wonder if that was kind of the game plan here: just dump the precursor materials into these packets and then try and make as many captagon pills as possible.'
MEE understands that one member of the Sudanese security forces drank a glass of water with two spoons of the powder mixed in 'and was awake for two days' - not the behaviour of someone who had consumed electrolytes.
'He was up all day and all night jumping,' a military source said.
Captagon from Sudan heading for the Gulf?
Hamza, the police officer, says captagon use was not widespread in Sudan before the conflict began, 'but it increased violently during the war'.
The first lab uncovered was in 2015 in Jabal Awliya, 45km south of Khartoum, with a reported production capacity of over 5,000 tablets per hour. Three months before the outbreak of war in April 2023, another facility, this time even larger, was found in eastern Blue Nile state.
Police say the factory in al-Jaili is the largest discovered since April 2023. Its discovery follows that of another, also found north of Khartoum, six months earlier.
Puzzlingly, a huge hole, several metres wide and deep, has been dug inside the compound. Satellite images show it was not present on 14 April 2023, one day before the war broke out.
'We suspect they were preparing to use it to store thousands of pills,' Hamza says. He would not say whether the captagon was being manufactured for export, suggesting such information is sensitive and investigations are ongoing.
A member of the Sudanese Armed Forces stands beside the huge hole mysteriously dug in the compound (Sudan News/X screengrab)
However, the collapse of the Syrian market has left a massive hole in the industry (more than 200 million tablets have been discovered and destroyed by Syria's new rulers). The lucrative Gulf market is just a hop over the Red Sea.
A recent report by the New Lines Institute noted that the discoveries in Syria were not followed by the arrests of producers, smugglers and distributors. 'The technical knowledge to produce captagon remains intact and could be redeployed elsewhere,' it said.
Rose says captagon laboratories have been busted in Sudan almost every year since 2022.
'We're not seeing other labs in neighbouring countries,' she says. 'For a while, the assumption was these are lone-wolf actors, maybe there is a bit of spillover from Syria.
'But if there's packaging materials and whatnot that is originating from Syria, there could be a closer connection here to both the Assad regime but also Syria-based criminal networks.'