‘We would fight them, slaughter them,’ Aadheen told me. ‘The moment we take a pill we would stop thinking about anything.’ The pill he’s referring to is Captagon, an amphetamine that’s said to fuel some of the brutality associated with Isis. In November last year, Turkish authorities seized 11 million Captagon pills on the Syrian border. In the same month, a Saudi prince was arrested after two tonnes of Captagon pills were found in cases being loaded onto a private jet. Aadheen is a former Isis member; he’s now a drug addict in hiding.
We met late at night in a safe house arranged by his dealer, close to the Syrian border. Aadheen sat silently in the corner, gently rocking back and forth. He was waiting for his next fix. He spoke so softly at times it was impossible to believe this mild mannered, scrawny man could have been a killing machine. But he was.
Captagon is a small white pill that looks like paracetamol.
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