Next Evolution of ISIS?

I noted two pieces of journalism in the past week, which talked about this new feature that came out of the Syrian civil war and ISIS.

For those who really didn't dig into ISIS operations over the past five years in Syria....they had to rely a great deal upon one single little pill....Captagon.  It's a upper....amphetamine.

The neat thing about it is that you could go out to your jihadist warrior team there....on the frontlines of the civil war....handing out the Captagons, and your guys would go and fight strong for a minimum of twenty-four hours, and even longer.  They would be hyped up and full of 'fake' energy.

It's one of those German-invented wonder drugs of the 1960s.  At some point....reality set in with the government folks, after about twenty-five years of usage, and it was kinda halted.

The drug has been quietly manufactured by a couple of underground labs, and today easily markets for $5 to $20 per pill.

From the two articles I read over....there is some belief that as the civil war is kinda going in a downward stage....there's a market out there for the drug now, and it's pulling the leadership of ISIS into a new stage....manufacture and deliver the drug to individual sellers.  Yes, ISIS is morphing into a drug-cartel of sorts.

But if you dig into this market story, there's an odd story out there.  Two years ago....fall of 2015....the Saudis came to bust a member of the royal family on importation of Captagon.  Two tons (yeah....massive bulk delivery) was going into Saudi Arabia....not Syria.  It's become a party-drug and cheap enough that no one is making a big deal over cost.

So you look at this introduction as a war-drug for the troops, and various labs created to make the stuff, and it just makes sense to move onto a money-making operation as the war is wrapping up.

No one ever talks much over the next stage of ISIS.  People have sat and watched the chaotic war in Syria/Iraq go on for five years now....thousands of young men thrown to the ISIS challenge....with probably half of those who signed up....now dead.  Between the efforts of the Iraqi Army, the Syrians, the Russians....you can sense that the war is in some conclusion stage....maybe a year....maybe two years down the line.  Then?  That's really the question which is never discussed by the news media or intellectuals.

One of the odd changes to the German drug-dealer market is that it used to be Turks and Russians who ran the illicit drug empire within Germany going back to the 1990 era.  In the past two decades....you've got Albanian, Lebanese, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Romanian mafia groups in the mix in terms of owning distribution.  The sales people?  Well....mostly Moroccans and Tunisians....with some Africans at the end of this job profession.

There's a bold new era coming in my humble opinion, with Captagon as a big-name drug on the streets of Germany....oddly being a product out of the ISIS-civil war.  The labs in Syria?  Likely to continue on and not be threatened because there's cash flow resulting from this one unlikely product.

A final note....this was a minor comment out of the French cop report from the Nice, France terror attack (84 dead) of summer 2016....cops did a chemical exam on the cellphone of the terrorist (dead)....yeah, it had Captagon residue on it.  The thug was likely doped up on it when he went into his terror act.  It wouldn't surprise me if the Berlin terrorist also used the drug.  We might even find out that the London jihadist from yesterday was using the stuff.