Syrian rebels uncover Assad regime's large-scale illegal drug laboratories

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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.

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