Two assaults reportedly focused a drug manufacturing unit and the house of drug vendor Marai al-Ramthan and his household.
A suspected drug smuggler and his household have been killed in an air raid in southern Syria, an assault attributed to Jordan, based on a struggle monitor.
Amman didn’t instantly touch upon Monday’s assault, which got here days after Jordan warned it will use power inside Syria to get rid of drug trafficking to its territories and onwards to Arab Gulf nations.
“[Drug dealer] Marai al-Ramthan, his spouse and 6 youngsters had been killed in a Jordanian air power strike” within the east of Sweida province, close to the Syria-Jordan border, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) stated.
“Al-Ramthan is taken into account to be essentially the most outstanding drug trafficker within the area, and the primary smuggler of medication, together with captagon, into Jordan” from that space, stated the Observatory, which depends on a large community of sources in Syria.
One other assault within the southern province of Deraa was reported by the SOHR, which stated it hit a constructing that housed a drug manufacturing unit.
Opposition activist Ahmad al-Masalmeh, who covers developments in southern Syria, concurred that one pre-dawn assault killed al-Ramthan and his household and the opposite hit a facility utilized by Iran-backed teams to provide and retailer medication for smuggling to Jordan.
On Could 1, a number of Arab overseas ministers met in Amman, the place Damascus agreed to cooperate with Jordan and Iraq to determine sources of drug manufacturing and smuggling and “take obligatory steps to finish smuggling operations”, based on a press release from Jordan’s overseas ministry.
On Sunday, the Arab League welcomed Syria again into the bloc after a suspension that lasted greater than a decade, securing President Bashar al-Assad’s return to the Arab fold after years of isolation.
Massive trade
Damascus has denied accusations that it sells captagon, a extremely addictive amphetamine, to boost funds, estimated by observers to be within the billions of {dollars}, for al-Assad and his associates and allies.
Whereas the principle locations are oil-rich Gulf international locations, Jordan has develop into a transit level for the commerce.
Final week, Jordanian International Minister Ayman Safadi warned that his nation wouldn’t stand idle if drug trafficking continues from Syria.
Safadi instructed CNN: “If we don’t see efficient measures to curb that risk, we are going to do what it takes to counter that risk, together with taking army motion inside Syria to get rid of this extraordinarily harmful risk.”
In February 2022, Jordan’s military stated it had killed 30 smugglers because the begin of the yr and foiled makes an attempt to smuggle 16 million captagon tablets into the dominion from Syria – surpassing all the quantity seized all through 2021.
Jordan has beforehand launched raids concentrating on drug smugglers in Syria, way back to 2014.
