Over 1 million captagon pills bound for neighboring countries seized in Iraq

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s Intelligence Service announced Tuesday it had foiled an attempt to smuggle more than 1 million captagon pills and 100 kilograms of hashish through Iraqi territory to neighboring countries.

The agency said the operation relied on precise intelligence to identify and track members of a criminal network composed of Iraqi and foreign nationals, with arrests made across several governorates in cooperation with the General Directorate of Narcotics Control in Sulaymaniyah. All network members were arrested and the full shipment seized, the agency said. The operation was carried out in coordination with the Supreme Judicial Council.

Iraq’s judiciary issued 26 death sentences against drug traffickers in the first quarter of 2026 alone. The country has evolved from a transit corridor into both a consumer market and redistribution hub, with traffickers increasingly using sophisticated cross-border networks and, in some cases, GPS-equipped balloons to move drugs across the Anbar border. Between January and August 2024, courts issued 140 death sentences and 500 life sentences in trafficking cases, with 3,006 arrests recorded in the first quarter of 2025.