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00:00In a military base on the outskirts of Damascus, this HTS soldier, whose forces now control
00:06Syria, reveals a hidden secret of the Assad regime.
00:10In this ransacked building, soldiers say they have found thousands of bags, like this one.
00:16It's Captagon drugs.
00:19Captagon is an illegal synthetic drug, very similar to amphetamines.
00:26It really is a surprise to have found so much of it.
00:29We knew they had drugs, but not this much.
00:33But where do these drugs, which are currently flooding the Middle East, come from?
00:37And how has Syria become the world's largest producer?
00:41Further out of Damascus, behind the gates of this isolated villa, drug residue still
00:47covers the driveway.
00:49It's drugs.
00:52We destroyed the pills last night, and this is the powder.
00:56According to the soldiers, the drugs were worth millions.
01:00Inside, soldiers found a real Captagon factory.
01:06All of this is medicine, but here they added chemicals to turn it into drugs.
01:14This is where they mixed the ingredients, and it went here.
01:21It's already drugs.
01:24Then they put it in this machine and turned them into pills.
01:29The HTS fighters said the factory produced millions of pills every day.
01:34Cheap and easy to produce, Captagon had become a financial lifeline for the Bashar al-Assad
01:39regime as the country slipped into war and economic crisis.
01:45These pills ended up all around the world.
01:47It was a very lucrative business.
01:50All of this belongs to Waseem al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad's cousin.
01:54Syria's new rulers have sworn to put an end to the Captagon business, but have in the
01:59past been accused of producing it themselves to finance their activities.