It was almost as though nothing at all had happened. In May 2023, Arabic leaders welcomed long-ostracized Syrian dictator Bashar Assad back into the fold at the Arab League summit – complete with brotherly kisses, warm embraces and the proverbial red carpet, which skewed violet in this particular case

Syria had been blacklisted in 2011 when the regime in Damascus began shooting at demonstrators, who were still largely peaceful at the time. In the years that followed, Assad’s troops – with the enthusiastic support of first the Hezbollah and then the Iranians and Russians – transformed the rebellious parts of the country into smoking heaps of rubble, killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians and forcing millions more to flee

At the summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, though, all seemed to be forgotten – as if it had merely been a minor misunderstanding. Syria was readmitted with the appropriate pomp. “We stand together against the currents of darkness,” said Assad, portraying the mass murder he committed to cling to power as a noble undertaking

In Syria’s dictatorship, meanwhile, nothing has changed, with mafia-like structures still flourishing in the economy as well. Drug smuggling, in particular to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, continues apace – and all this despite hopes from Arab League member states that welcoming Damascus back into the group might slow down the illicit drug flows

Instead, Syria’s ruling family is deeply involved in illegal business dealings. That is illustrated by the case of a Syrian executive whose activities have been uncovered by a team of Syrian and international journalists together with DER SPIEGEL. In early March 2023, the travel agency FreeBird Travel and Tourism announced on its website: “Hello Europe – we’re back.” After more than a decade of isolation, the airline Air Mediterranean, flights on which accordingly could only be booked via FreeBird, was offering direct connections to Europe. The first flight from Düsseldorf to Damascus via Athens took place on June 24, and since then the airline has been servicing the route once a week.

The FreeBird website lists two offices, one in Dubai and another in Athens. The agency is actually registered in the Damascus Free Trade Zone, where no information about company owners is made public

FreeBird’s chairman would have remained a secret – had he not gone public himself with the information: Mahmoud Abdullah Aldij, a major player in the transportation industry, both from and to Syria. On Facebook, Aldij presents himself as the head of FreeBird as well as a representative of the Syrian airline Cham Wings, which is on the U.S. sanctions list for transporting both militia fighters and munitions on behalf of the Syrian regime. But it seems that Aldij has made a name for himself in another transport sector as well: as a drug smuggler who, according to investigators, was involved in at least three large shipments of the synthetic stimulant Captagon to Libya. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) reported on the investigation into Aldij back in 2021