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Today, Poland launches a terrorism investigation after a blast targeting a rail line supplying Ukraine, the UK dismisses reports that it curtailed intelligence sharing with Washington, and China escalates pressure on Japan following Prime Minister Takaichi’s remarks on Taiwan.

Our lead story examines how captagon production, once centred in Syria, is dispersing across the region.

Read more below ⤵️

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4️⃣ 🇰🇷 🇰🇵 South Korea offers talks with North to prevent accidental armed clash at border: Seoul has proposed the first inter-Korean military talks in seven years after North Korean troops repeatedly crossed the demarcation line while laying mines and building fortifications, prompting warning shots from Seoul’s forces. Pyongyang has yet to respond, but acceptance would mark the first such meeting since 2018 and a significant test of Seoul’s new diplomatic approach.

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Major Story

🇸🇾 🇾🇪 🇹🇷 🇸🇩 CAPTAGON PRODUCTION DISPERSES AS ASSAD’S COLLAPSE RESHAPES THE REGIONAL DRUG TRADE

For more than a decade, the Assad regime, often working with partners in Lebanon, dominated the captagon trade, turning Syria into the region’s industrial hub and using the drug for both revenue and political leverage. Over the past four years, and especially after Assad’s fall, that monopoly has dissolved. Production has migrated into a patchwork of fragile states such as Yemen and Sudan, where demand, technical know-how, and the ease of assembling makeshift laboratories have enabled rapid expansion. 

Drawing on more than 1,800 documented incidents in the New Lines Institute’s Captagon Trade database, the pattern is clear: the industry is no longer centralised but dispersed, opportunistic, and embedded in unstable environments closer to consumer markets.

Smaller shipments and the rise of new producers

Despite a record number of seizures in 2024, the total volume of intercepted captagon has fallen sharply, reflecting a shift away from Syria’s large, protected industrial facilities toward smaller, more agile operations. The scale of the Assad-era industry became evident in early 2025, when the Syrian caretaker government confiscated over 200 million pills — twenty times the regime’s seizures the previous year. New producers lack comparable infrastructure, forcing reliance on frequent micro-shipments to evade detection. Syrian syndicates fleeing Damascus’s crackdown appear to be relocating to permissive environments, including Yemen.

Emerging hubs across the Middle East and Europe

Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Kuwait, Türkiye, Yemen, and even Germany have all uncovered local production sites since 2021. Egypt and Iraq now report regular factory dismantling and large-scale arrests. Sudan’s civil war has created ideal conditions for industrial-scale manufacturing by armed groups such as the RSF, aided by proximity to lucrative Gulf markets. Kuwait and Türkiye have seized sophisticated laboratories, while Yemen’s output has surged dramatically since 2024. Germany’s dismantling of major facilities suggests Syrian groups may be exporting stockpiles through European criminal networks.

Implications for security and public health

The dispersal of production risks intensifying violence as competing networks contest routes and markets, as seen in the smuggling battles along the Syrian–Lebanese border after Assad’s fall. Fragmented supply chains may also push users toward methamphetamine, deepening addiction crises in countries with overstretched health systems. Meanwhile, mobile labs and new trafficking methods challenge enforcement agencies already struggling with limited capacity.

Captagon’s shift from a centralised, state-enabled industry to a diffuse regional economy marks a new and far more volatile phase in the Middle East’s synthetic drug landscape.

Other News

1️⃣ 🇵🇱 🇺🇦 Poland opens terrorism probe after blast on rail line to Ukraine: Poland has launched a terrorism-related sabotage investigation after an explosion damaged a key railway line supplying Ukraine, an incident Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an “unprecedented” attempt to cause a mass-casualty derailment. Authorities say the blast, along with a second suspected sabotage attempt nearby, fits a wider pattern of Russian-linked operations aimed at destabilising European support for Kyiv.

2️⃣ 🇬🇧 🇺🇸 UK downplays claims of curbing intelligence sharing with Washington: Britain’s foreign secretary Yvette Cooper has rejected reports that the UK suspended intelligence sharing with the US over concerns about the legality of American strikes on suspected narco-traffickers in the Caribbean, insisting that long-standing intelligence and law-enforcement cooperation remains intact. 

3️⃣ 🇨🇳 🇯🇵 🇹🇼 China escalates pressure on Japan after PM Takaichi’s Taiwan comments: China has intensified military and coastguard activity around Japan’s southwest islands after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi warned that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response. Beijing sent coastguard vessels through the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu waters and flew drones near Japan’s outer islands, while simultaneously summoning Japan’s ambassador, and denouncing Takaichi’s remarks as dangerously provocative.

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