Two assaults reportedly focused a drug manufacturing unit and the house of drug supplier 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, in accordance with a battle monitor.
Amman didn’t instantly touch upon Monday’s assault, which got here days after Jordan warned it could use power inside Syria to remove 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) mentioned.
“Al-Ramthan is taken into account to be essentially the most distinguished drug trafficker within the area, and the primary smuggler of medicine, together with captagon, into Jordan” from that space, mentioned 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 mentioned 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 medicine for smuggling to Jordan.
On Might 1, a number of Arab international ministers met in Amman, the place Damascus agreed to cooperate with Jordan and Iraq to establish sources of drug manufacturing and smuggling and “take essential steps to finish smuggling operations”, in accordance with an announcement from Jordan’s international ministry.
On Sunday, the Arab League welcomed Syria back 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.
Giant business
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 grow to be 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’ll do what it takes to counter that risk, together with taking army motion inside Syria to remove this extraordinarily harmful risk.”
In February 2022, Jordan’s military mentioned it had killed 30 smugglers for the reason that begin of the yr and foiled makes an attempt to smuggle 16 million captagon tablets into the dominion from Syria – surpassing the complete quantity seized all through 2021.
Jordan has beforehand launched raids focusing on drug smugglers in Syria, way back to 2014.
