U.S. Rep. French Hill (R-AR) on Sunday joined some of his Republican colleagues in visiting Syria, where he continued efforts to highlight the innocent Syrians being murdered by Bashar al-Assad’s regime in an effort to bring more support to the region’s people.
“The Syrian people have endured more than a decade of war, murder, and torture,” Rep. Hill said on Aug. 28. “It is imperative that nations across the globe, including the United States, work together to provide humanitarian aid to the Syrian people and to counter the Assad regime.”
The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a non-profit based in Rep. Hill’s district in central Arkansas, has been a strong advocate in leading humanitarian efforts in the region, according to the congressman.
Alongside U.S. Reps. Ben Cline (R-VA) and Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), Rep. Hill visited both the children of the Wisdom House in northwest Syria, which is SETF’s sponsored school for orphans, and the House of Healing in Gaziantep, Turkey, the organization’s sponsored healthcare residence for chronically ill Syrians.
“I will continue my work in Congress on the issue of Syria and its future,” said Rep. Hill, who serves as a co-chair of the Friends of a Free, Stable and Democratic Syria Caucus. “I thank the amazing, dedicated staffs at the Wisdom House and House of Healing for their incredible work in helping the Syrian people and for all Arkansans who support the SETF-backed organizations helping Syrians throughout the region.”
Rep. Hill added that his trip to the region is not only a continuation of consultations he has held this year with diplomats and other partners in Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Italy to address the Arab League’s initiative to normalize relations with Assad, but to also discuss the U.S. government’s strategy to dismantle the production and trafficking of captagon.
The synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant has been clandestinely produced in southern Europe and trafficked through Turkey to the consumer markets on the Arabian Peninsula, according to the U.S. Office of Justice Programs.
“The Assad regime’s production and distribution of this illegal drug is threatening regional societies and financially fueling Assad’s reign of terror, which must be stopped,” Rep. Hill said on Monday.
Rep. Hill’s Countering Assad’s Proliferation Trafficking And Garnering Of Narcotics (CAPTAGON) Act, H.R. 6265, which he introduced in December 2021, passed as part of the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act and was signed into law in December 2022.
The bill requires the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and other appropriate federal agencies to report to Congress a strategy to disrupt and dismantle narcotics production and trafficking networks linked to the Assad regime in Syria.
The Biden administration on June 29 released its interagency strategy in their report to Congress that outlines plans to target, disrupt, and degrade networks that support the narcotics infrastructure of the Assad regime and build counter-narcotics capacity of partner countries through foreign assistance and training to law enforcement services in countries (other than Syria) that are receiving or transiting large quantities of Syria-origin captagon.