Harmoon Center for Contemporary Studies and the Irish Syria Solidarity Movement have come together to host this seminar to ask why the international community, especially the EU and the US, are ignoring the epi-center in Syria of a burgeoning drug crisis in the Middle East as the Assad regime turned the country into a narco-state. Some estimates suggest the annual value of the Captagon (“the poor man’s cocaine”) trade is as high as $30 Billion which has transformed the personal wealth of Bashar al-Assad and his family and is believed to be helping him cushion the impact of sanctions on his regime while acting as a catalyst in creating an ever-growing drug addiction crisis across the region and which threatens to spread into Europe.
Speakers include Charles Lister, Senior Fellow and Director of the Syria Program at the Middle East Institute; Caroline Rose, Senior Analyst and Program Head at the Newlines Institute and author of a major report on Captagon; Ronan Tynan filmmaker and director of the recently released and multi award winning documentary ‘Bringing Assad To justice’; and Rahaf Aldoughli, Director of Research at Harmoon Center.
The Seminar will be chaired by Leonie O’Dowd of the Irish Syria Solidarity Movement (ISSM).
The webinar will be followed by 30 mins of Q&A.
Friday, 9th of December 2022
12:00 Washington DC time / 17:00 GMT (Dublin and London time) / 20:00 Istanbul time.
Please Click Here for the Registration
