Free Republic

ISIS fighters are taking cheap, easy-to-make amphetamine pills that help keep them awake for days, which is fuelling the civil war in Syria. The small tablets of the highly addictive substance Captagon are produced in Syria and is widely available across the Middle East. It is thought that the trade of the drugs brings in millions of dollars in revenue to Syria, providing funding for weapons and ammunition. .......A drug control officer in the central city of Homs said he had observed the effects of Captagon on protesters and fighters held for questioning. He told Reuters news agency: 'We would...

As The Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al Qaeda veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers." On the surface, those competing actors are fueled by an overlapping mixture of ideologies and political agendas. Just below it, experts suspect, they're powered by something else: Captagon. A tiny, highly addictive pill produced in Syria and widely available across the Middle East, its illegal sale funnels hundreds of millions of dollars back into the war torn country's black market economy each year, likely giving militias access to...

Syria has begun moving parts of its vast arsenal of chemical weapons out of storage facilities, U.S. officials said, in a development that has alarmed many in Washington. The country's undeclared stockpiles of sarin nerve agent, mustard gas and cyanide have long worried U.S. officials and their allies in the region, who have watched anxiously amid the conflict in Syria for any change in the status or location of the weapons.