Since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar Assad, industrial-scale manufacturing facilities of the amphetamine-like stimulant Captagon have been uncovered around the country, which experts say fed a $10 billion annual global trade in the highly addictive drug.

Rabih, a man from Syria’s border town of Qusayr who asked to only share his first name, lost his home before escaping to Arsal, a town in Lebanon, in 2013.

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his years-long regime have fallen, but the country remains a battleground for an array of actors seeking to secure interests in what may emerge to be a dangerous power vacuum.

Israel is celebrating the fall of Assad because it breaks the noose that Iran had been patiently tightening around Israel’s borders in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Tehran’s pincer is now broken and rendered useless. From the point of view of Israel’s wider conflict with the Islamic Republic, the collapse of Assad’s regime is a strategic victory.

Assad's regime raked in $5 billion per year from the Captagon drug trade, dwarfing Syria's official budget and making it a lifeline for the bankrupted country. Imtiaz Tyab has new details about what was discovered about the trade after Assad's rule collapsed.