Jordan strikes drug, arms smugglers in Syria border region: Reports 

Jordan’s military has launched strikes on drug and weapons smugglers in the country’s northern border regions with Syria, targeting sites used as “launch points” by trafficking groups into Jordanian territory, according to reports.

The Jordan News Agency, Petra, said the strikes on Wednesday “neutralised a number of arms and drug traffickers who organise weapons and narcotics smuggling operations along the northern border of the Kingdom”.

Jordan’s armed forces destroyed “factories and workshops” used by the trafficking groups, Petra reports, adding that the attacks were carried out based on “precise intelligence” and in coordination with regional partners.

The Jordanian military did not name the partner countries involved in the strikes but warned that it would “continue to counter any threats with force at the appropriate time and place”, Petra said.

Syrian state broadcaster Al-Ikhbariah TV reported on its Telegram channel that the Jordanian army had carried out air strikes on locations in the southern and eastern countryside of Syria’s Suwayda governorate.

A resident of Syria’s Suwayda border region told the AFP news agency that the bombardment “was extremely intense and targeted farms and smuggling routes”, while the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said jets and helicopters had reportedly taken part in the raid.

The observatory said photos taken at the scene of the attacks showed destruction at an abandoned military barracks of the former al-Assad regime in Suwayda.

There were no initial reports of casualties from the Jordanian attacks and no official comment from authorities in Damascus.

A farm believed to have been used for storing drugs was among the targets, according to the Zaman Al Wasl online news site, which also reported that similar Jordanian attacks had been carried out previously in a bid to stem the flow of captagon – an addictive, amphetamine-type stimulant.

Before the removal of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, captagon had become the regime’s largest export and key source of funding amid the country’s years of grinding civil war.

Produced in vast quantities in Syria, the synthetic drug flooded the region, particularly the Gulf states, prompting neighbouring countries to announce seizures and call on both Lebanon and Damascus to ramp up efforts to combat the trade.

Although Damascus denied any involvement in the drug trade, analysts estimated that production and smuggling of captagon brought in billions of dollars for al-Assad, his associates and allies as they looked for an economic lifeline amid the civil war, which was fought between 2011 and the regime’s toppling last year.