Lebanon: Hezbollah forces Syrian women to manufacture, smuggle drugs
The Iranian-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah continues to commit violations against Syrian women, forcing them to work in the drug trade, manufacturing, and smuggling.
Media reports have revealed that pro-Iranian militias and gangs, led by the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, are using Syrian workers to manufacture and smuggle drugs via Jordan to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries after they are manufactured in Syria and Lebanon.
According to reports, the value of the Captagon pill trade in the Middle East exceeded $5 billion in 2021. It pointed out that Syria is the main producer of these pills. Reports indicated that the Captagon pill industry in Syria, which is the basis of Hezbollah’s funding, owns dozens of workshops to manufacture drugs, and the same number of primitive packaging factories that are exported through smuggling networks, depends on Syrian and Lebanese women.
Observers said that the Hezbollah terrorist militia forces Syrian women to participate in drug trafficking, especially women in the towns along the border with Lebanon. They confirmed that Hezbollah’s members, under Iranian directives, decided to exploit women from socially and economically marginalized backgrounds to force them to work in drug trafficking as a form of diversification in funding, in addition to the fact that manufacturing these huge quantities of drugs is one of the Iranian regime’s schemes to spread chaos and harm Arab youth, specifically in the Arabian Gulf.
The UN published a report on the drug industry in Syria and Lebanon, in which it said extremist militias are forcing women to work in the field amid threats to their children and by killing or deceiving them.
A Syrian woman said she was forced to trade with Hezbollah in the manufacture of Captagon pills for export. She said she would be killed if she refused to deal with the militia or if she tried to escape.
The woman, who refused to give her name, said: “She was leading a normal life, and then a man from the party started approaching her and forced her to work with them”. She also revealed that there are large numbers of Syrian women working in the drug industry for Hezbollah militias, as Syrian women suffer from crises and difficult social conditions that extremist militias exploit to force them to work with them.
The escalation of abuses has forced the U.S. judiciary to establish a special unit to investigate the sources of funding for Hezbollah militias, especially after U.S. authorities confirmed the involvement of Iranian-backed militias in the manufacture and circulation of drugs and weapons in massive amounts.
AFP reported that the US Department of Justice confirmed that the special unit aims to eliminate the trio of terrorism, drugs and weapons, and to pursue Hezbollah members and their sources of funding. The US team also includes specialists in money laundering, drug smuggling, and combating terrorism and organized crime.
