Lebanese army seizes 1.2 million captagon pills

Lebanon's military said on Tuesday that it had seized 1.2 million captagon pills that were about to be sent abroad.

Lebanon has faced pressure from Gulf states to counter the production and trafficking of drugs, particularly the amphetamine-like narcotic captagon, for which the conservative monarchies are a major market.

In a statement, the Lebanese army said it had arrested "two individuals... while they were packing approximately 1.2 million captagon pills into a vehicle for smuggling out of Lebanon" in an area north of Beirut.

In neighbouring Syria, captagon was the largest export following the eruption of the civil war in 2011 and a key source of illicit funding for former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's government.

Since Assad's fall in 2024, the new authorities in Damascus have been working to combat the captagon trade, while both countries are trying to stop smuggling on their porous, 330-kilometre-long (205-mile) border.

In Lebanon, Assad's ally Hezbollah has also faced accusations of using the captagon trade to finance itself.

The synthetic drug has flooded the region, with neighbouring countries occasionally announcing seizures and asking Lebanon and Syria to ramp up efforts to combat the trade.