The combined effect of the shocks to the Assad regime and Hezbollah’s operational capacity has been to transform, rather than end, illicit cross-border economies like arms and captagon
Prior to the fall of Assad in late 2024, Syria’s wartime checkpoint economy was emeshed with Lebanon’s—dominated by security apparatuses affiliated with the Syrian regime and its Iranian sponsors. With the regime having monopolised industrial-scale production of illicit drugs like captagon, Hezbollah-linked facilitators and financiers proved to be useful allies.
Already closely aligned with the Assad family and its Fourth Armored Division, Hezbollah and aligned families, militias, and syndicates played a supportive role in facilitating illicit flows to and from Syria: they protected cross-border smuggled goods from law enforcement intervention, enabled access to some of Lebanon’s busiest commercial seaports and airports, sent personnel into southern and central Syria to guard storage warehouses and production sites, and even played host to Syrian drug laboratories along the border region.
However, this dynamic came to a quick close once opposition forces, led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, came marching into Damascus from Syria’s northwest, forcing the Assad family to flee and inducing a swift conclusion to decades of Baathist power in Syria. A series of drug laboratory busts, seizures of drug stockpiles, and arrests of regime-aligned illicit syndicates followed. With the regime out of the picture, illicit drug trades like captagon were no longer anchored in Syria, creating space for new actors to enter the fold and capitalise on the new supply shortage.
Hezbollah-aligned actors in Lebanon have long been suspected of attempting to occupy this new space, particularly given their extensive experience with illicit drug trades like hashish and close ties to the regime’s security apparatus. There has also been an expectation that Lebanon would transform into a successor of sorts for Syria’s illicit drug production and trafficking activities, spilling over across the Qalamoun Mountain Range.
However, the last eight months have proven a much more complicated, dynamic picture, with Hezbollah and its aligned networks treading a careful line between indirect engagement, contestation against rival criminal groups, and caution against a strengthened Lebanese state and risk of targeting by Israel.
This picture taken on July 27, 2022, shows a view of sacks of confiscated captagon pills at the judicial police headquarters in the town of Kafarshima, south of Lebanon's capital, Beirut.
History of involvement
Before 2025, Hezbollah and aligned networks along the Syrian-Lebanese border played a key role in illicit operations, characterised by regime protection, militia engagement, and patronage systems. From the mid-2010s through 2023, Syria evolved from a producer of a relatively small-scale narcotics industry to a major regional hub for amphetamine-type stimulants (commonly called “captagon” in media reporting).
Investigations about Syria’s underground economy documented a pattern in the late 2010s and early 2020s: factories or laboratories operating under the protection or tacit approval of local authorities; criminal networks using front companies and cross-border smuggling routes; and profits being channelled into patronage systems that sustained militias and local powerbrokers.
Hezbollah and the Assad regime had mutually engaged in illicit drug trades well before drugs like captagon became a major feature in Syria’s wartime economy. During Hafez al-Assad’s rule and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon between 1976 and 2005, the regime’s security officers reportedly engaged with Hezbollah in managing and taxing the local, illicit cannabis trade.
It levied a tax on cannabis crops throughout Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley range—notorious for widespread cannabis cultivation and communal patronage to Hezbollah—that would be split amongst Syrian military and intelligence officers waging the occupation.
This ‘checkpoint economy’ waged by the Syrian occupation exacerbated illicit activities in Lebanon, helping transform the Bekaa, once Lebanon’s ‘breadbasket’, into a hub of cross-border black market activity with close linkages to armed groups.
The fall of the Assad regime meant that the drug trade was no longer anchored in Syria, creating space for new actors to enter the fold
The partnership cultivated between the regime's security apparatus and Hezbollah during this time was strengthened over the decades, particularly after the advent of the Syrian civil war, international sanctions, and neighbouring Lebanon's economic crisis, which collectively created incentives to resort to illicit trades for alternative revenue streams amongst militias and regime forces that needed funds to sustain their activities.
Hezbollah's role in this ecosystem was not monolithic, but there are multiple strands of evidence that link the group and individuals tied to it to facilitation, protection and finance of trafficking networks. US sanctions and Treasury advisories have explicitly named Lebanon-based traffickers, such as Hassan Daqqo, Noah Zeaiter, and Antoine Kassis, with ties to Hezbollah and Assad regime smuggling networks, and investigative reports have documented cases in which Hezbollah operatives or affiliates were involved in smuggling, money-laundering, or using political connections to move product across borders.
Prominent figures aligned with Hezbollah from prominent families known for illicit activities, such as Noah Zeaiter, were often seen personally engaging with Assad family members and regime security officers, both in Lebanon and Syria. In January 2017, a group photo was posted depicting Zeaiter meeting with Wassim Badia Al-Assad, President Bashar al-Assad's cousin, and Fourth Armoured Division officer Muhammad Zaroor in the lobby of the Damascus Sharaton Hotel over tea and cigarettes. Zeaiter even relocated to Latakia, a prominent Syrian smuggling hub, to dodge interdiction, with the support of Wassim Badia al-Assad in 2024.
Wasim al-Assad
In short, Hezbollah was one of several armed actors in neighbouring Lebanon that could provide security, border access, and logistical know-how for moving goods produced in Syria to markets in the Gulf, North Africa and beyond.
Two dynamics made Hezbollah useful to traffickers. First, its close operational relationship with Syrian security structures and local militias in the border and production zones meant knowledge and access. For example, Hezbollah-aligned trafficker Hassan Daqqo received a Fourth Armoured Division identification card to help facilitate drug consignments across the Syrian-Lebanese border, enabling access and protection over large shipments.
Second, Hezbollah's transnational networks (in Lebanon, certain Gulf commercial hubs, and parts of the Levant) gave channels for distribution, collection of cash, and concealment. Hezbollah served very much as a hybrid actor in this space of cross-border smuggling, blurring political and security lines, while co-opting local prominent families like the Daqqos, Zeaiters, or Jaafars to sustain these illicit operations in partnership with the Syrian regime.
Two shocks
This dynamic of mutual support between Hezbollah and the regime helped bolster revenue streams, generating millions as alternative revenue for illicit products like captagon (a drug very cheap and easy to make with large profit margins). However, there were two shocks in rapid succession in late 2024 that rewired the incentives and practicalities of the cross-border Lebanese-Syrian illicit economy: the dramatic collapse of the Assad regime and a period of intense Israeli strikes that degraded Hezbollah's logistics and leadership in late 2024.
These two shocks partially dissolved the protection networks over Syrian-Lebanese illicit economies, with regime actors fleeing Syria completely or shifting into neighbouring countries to either engage with existing partners or forge new paths of criminal collaboration with local actors. Ultimately, these protection networks became decentralised and commercialised, and smuggling routes and business models adapted to new realities that corresponded to emerging balances of power.
A Syrian rebel fighter holds a container of pills of Captagon discovered at a drug manufacturing facility in the city of Douma on the eastern outskirts of Damascus on December 12, 2024.
A large shift in illicit flows occurred along the Syrian-Lebanese border, particularly after the new Syrian administration—led by Ahmed al-Sharaa—signalled that it would not tolerate Syria's continuation as a major hub of illicit activity. Actors aligned with the regime who played a role in smuggling fled to Lebanon to hide.
Lebanon-based criminal syndicates also worked with former regime-aligned networks to rid Syria of its major drug stockpiles before the new administration seized them, while also transferring production equipment and establishing a handful of small-scale laboratories in Lebanon. One notable Assad cousin, Wassim Badia al-Assad, was hiding in Tripoli before a double agent from Syria's Interior Ministry was able to lure him back into Syria, where he was arrested.
While Lebanon was a natural spillover site for illicit flows and former regime-syndicates, it became less attractive and even more complicated by developments that occurred earlier that year. Targeted Israeli intelligence-driven sabotage and precision strikes on Hezbollah leadership, infrastructure, and supply routes from mid-to-late 2024 seriously degraded Hezbollah's command, logistics and some cross-border capabilities. Intelligence and press reporting indicate that Hezbollah suffered losses in leadership, supply chains, and the deniability it had previously enjoyed for certain extralegal operations.
While Israel and Hezbollah entered into a tentative ceasefire, the effects of Israel's strike campaign have lingered in Lebanon. Firstly, the threat of resumed strikes from Israel has loomed over Hezbollah and the Lebanese population, with constant signalling from Tel Aviv that Netanyahu is interested in reviving multiple fronts to its war in Gaza and wishes to further dismantle Iranian influence in the Levant.
Secondly, the Lebanese government has capitalised on Hezbollah's weakening, creating greater space for its security forces—both its police and its army—to enter into formally contested areas controlled by Hezbollah, increase the central government's capacity, and pursue criminal syndicates that previously enjoyed Hezbollah protection.
Fighters affiliated with the Syrian Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham group display previously seized drugs at a checkpoint they control in Darat Izza, in the northwestern Aleppo countryside, on April 10, 2022.
As a result, the Lebanese police and Lebanese Armed Forces have conducted more laboratory raids in the country than in previous years. According to exclusive data compiled by the New Lines Institute's Comprehensive Captagon Seizure Database, the Lebanese forces recorded the seizure of at least three production sites in 2025 alone (for reference, the Lebanese forces seized no laboratories last year).
The Lebanese Interior Ministry, similar to their Syrian counterparts, has also felt more empowered to conduct arrests of Hezbollah-aligned individuals that had previously been 'untouchable' in the year prior. The Lebanese army even killed Ali Mounzer Zeaiter (popularly known as Abu Salla) in a raid in Baalbek—one of the most notorious druglords in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and related to Noah Zeaiter and a close ally of the former regime. His death during the raid marked a significant blow to the Zeaiter family's influence and symbolised the government's determination to dismantle entrenched trafficking networks.
New dynamic
While Lebanon has served as a natural spillover for illicit trades and criminal actors from Syria, and Hezbollah's engagement in these activities has remained, it is clear that the absence of its former ally, the Assad regime, and recent weakening from Israeli strikes, have introduced a new dynamic. Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon are undoubtedly less attractive for criminal actors, with increased attention and targeting by Israel and a more empowered, effective Lebanese security apparatus.
However, the 'old guard' that represented the Hezbollah-regime alliance has made it clear they will not go silently into the night. In February and March of 2025, violent clashes emerged along the Syrian-Lebanon border involving key trafficking families and spurred a crackdown by Lebanese and Syrian authorities that led to seizures and arrests. Violent clashes erupted between Hezbollah-affiliated clans, notably the influential Zeaiter family, and Syrian Army forces along the Lebanon-Syria border.
These confrontations were driven by fierce competition over control of smuggling routes and cross-border trafficking networks. The Zeaiter family, a well-known player in drug trafficking and criminal enterprises, resisted Syrian military attempts to consolidate control, resulting in multiple armed engagements that heightened regional tensions.
These Lebanese groups kidnapped several Syrian Army forces across the border, killing three, and engaged in clashes with both Lebanese Army and Syrian Army forces both within and across the border. Syrian Forces even kidnapped and killed Zeaiter family member Khodr Karam Zeaiter, along with several members of the notable Hezbollah-linked trafficking family, the Jaafar family.
These developments reflect the volatile contest for control over lucrative illicit trade routes and highlight the challenges faced by states seeking to restore order in a fragmented security environment.
Looking ahead, the combined effect of the shocks to the Assad regime and Hezbollah's operational capacity has been to transform, rather than end, illicit cross-border economies like arms and captagon. Ultimately, production has become fragmented and privatised, with production capacity decentralised into smaller labs operated by local criminal entrepreneurs or competing armed groups across the Levant, increasing enforcement challenges.
The loss of Assad-era patronage has created a power vacuum that, no doubt, Hezbollah-aligned actors have sought to fill. However, they face obstacles with both increased capacity amongst Lebanese police and security forces as well as the constant threat of resumed Israeli strikes on infrastructure that Tel Aviv could deem a legitimate Hezbollah target.
However, demand levels remain for illicit drugs, arms, and other products in the region, creating an incentive for Lebanon-based actors—even weakened Hezbollah-aligned networks—to sustain illicit operations and serve as political patrons. Illicit trades and criminal actors are resilient, with geopolitical shocks often providing new pathways for innovative ways to reinvent and remould groups' modus operandi.
This resilience underscores that combined political, financial, law enforcement, and governance responses are necessary to effectively confront the ever-evolving Syrian-Lebanese illicit economy and Hezbollah's role in underground markets.
