October 7, 2023, and the Post-Assad Era

The shock caused by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the geopolitical shifts it forced across the region lent increased urgency to Iran’s efforts to arm its Palestinian proxies in the West Bank. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, trafficking between Syria and Jordan increased again, with Syrian smugglers carrying out 282 border crossings into Jordan between October 2023 and March 2024, more than double the rate from the same period the previous year.²³¹ 

However, this uptick triggered a response by Israel and Jordan, both of which carried out crackdowns on traffickers and armed groups throughout 2024, restricting the flow of weapons between Syria and the West Bank and significantly reducing militant violence in the West Bank in 2025. These efforts were aided by the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria on December 8, 2024, after which Iran and its proxies withdrew en masse from the country, reducing their capacity to direct arms flows and eliminating a key push factor that drove violence in the West Bank.

Despite this crackdown, by mid-2025, trafficking between Syria and Jordan rose again in parallel with a corresponding increase in weapons seizures on the Jordanian-Israeli border and a renewed uptick in violent attacks by West Bank militant groups beginning in September 2025, in particular by Iran’s proxy Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).²³² These increases can be attributed in part to the persistence of pull factors in the region, in particular a significant uptick in Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank in 2025 that cultivated a growing sense of grievance that PIJ and other militant groups could exploit amid the continued weakness of the PA.²³³

Similarly, though Iran and its proxies fled Syria after December 8, 2024, many of southern Syria’s largest local traffickers remained in the country and sought to ingratiate themselves to the country’s new authorities, which for most of 2025 lacked the capability to carry out large-scale crackdowns.²³⁴ The fragile state of the country after Assad’s overthrow meant that Syria’s interim government often relied on local power brokers, including smugglers, to maintain stability and ensure that state authority extended to remote regions.  

As a result, many groups like the Army of Free Tribes (AFT) whose members were involved in trafficking were incorporated into the country’s security forces, while prominent traffickers such as Aimad Abu Zrayg and others were granted meetings with Syrian President Ahmed al-Shara’a early on to discuss the merger of reconciled rebel factions into the country’s new military structure.²³⁵ It wouldn’t be until December 19, 2025, about a year after Assad’s overthrow, that Abu Zrayg and his deputies were arrested.²³⁶

The outbreak of large-scale violence between Syria’s interim government and armed Druze opposition fighters in Suwayda in July 2025 further destabilized the region and prevented security forces from deploying units to the area to crack down on traffickers, whom some sources have alleged have taken refuge among Suwayda’s Druze fighters.²³⁷ 

Despite the removal of Assad, Captagon production has continued in Hizbollah-controlled parts of Lebanon.²³⁸ Though many Western sanctions on Syria have been lifted, the country’s economy remains depressed and has yet to experience large-scale recovery, leaving the country’s black-market economy an attractive option for Syrians with few alternatives. Under these circumstances, drug and weapons smuggling between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank remains a persistent threat, with sufficient push and pull factors remaining to incentivize Jordanians to participate in these networks. 

By December 2023, the threat of spillover posed by the growth in trafficking along the Syrian-Jordanian border pushed Jordanian security forces to launch a final crackdown on traffickers, beginning with a wave of airstrikes targeting smugglers in Syria on December 19 and a widespread campaign of arrests against traffickers in Mafraq province’s eastern al-Ruwayshid district on December 27.²³⁹ 

On December 30, al-Ghiyath notables in al-Ruwayshid filmed a statement from the home of tribal sheikh Ali Ayyad Hamir al-Sakran, stating, “We, notables of the al-Ghiyath tribe, condemn all acts [carried out] over the last several years that threaten…national security, and reiterate our pledge of loyalty to the Hashemite leadership, our dear King His Majesty Abdullah II bin Hussein…and our noble armed forces….We call on our security forces not to tolerate any individual who threatens national security…and we disown [all those who do].”²⁴⁰ 

Over the next six months, Jordanian security forces continued their campaign of air raids in al-Sha’ab and elsewhere and seized millions of Captagon pills on the border.²⁴¹ During this period, Jordan’s Public Security Directorate identified and issued arrest warrants for eight of the top traffickers based in the al-Ruwayshid town of Manshiat al-Ghiyath.²⁴² At least three, Abd al-Karim Ghiyath, Ayyad Hussein Ayyad al-Ghiyath, and Saud Ubayd Mukhlif al-Ghiyath were arrested between February and April 2024.²⁴³ 

Jordan’s crackdown also extended to Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood (JMB) cells with direct ties to Iran. Following a major seizure of high-quality explosives in March 2024, Jordanian security forces claimed to Reuters that the traffickers were Palestinian-origin JMB members who had been recruited by Saleh al-Arouri, Hamas’s West Bank commander based in Lebanon, who had long served as the main conduit between the organization and Tehran. Commenting on the seizure, a former commander in the General Intelligence Directorate told Reuters, “The Iranians have instructions to recruit Jordanians and penetrate the Jordan arena through agents….Their recruitment efforts span all segments of society.”²⁴⁴ 

Later, in June 2024, security services made two more large seizures of explosives, at least one of which occurred in the Amman neighborhood of South Marka, a JMB stronghold.²⁴⁵ Israeli forces announced a fourth seizure of a similarly large shipment of explosives on November 27. The shipment was allegedly directed by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) commanders Jawad Ghafari and Asghar Bagheri.²⁴⁶

These seizures contributed to a significant reduction in violence in the West Bank, as Palestinian militant groups now lacked the materials necessary to make IEDs that had increasingly been used to target Israeli troops. Without these weapons, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority were able to more easily pursue militant groups, launching three separate crackdowns in and around Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem, and other cities between August 2024 and January 2025.²⁴⁷ In the aftermath of these crackdowns, throughout 2025, attacks by Palestinian armed factions dropped 78 percent compared to 2024 and 93 percent from 2023, according to official Israel Defense Forces data.²⁴⁸ 

This drop in violence was not met by a comparable reduction in Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, a persistent driver of tensions since Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967. In 2025, attacks by Israeli settlers in the West Bank increased 25 percent from 2024, representing 15 percent of all attacks recorded since 2006.²⁴⁹ Such trends have likely fueled growing resentment among Palestinians, which could create long-term pull factors that fuel West Bank militant groups and their interest in obtaining foreign support. 

As Palestinian militant violence in the West Bank began to subside, the December 8, 2024, overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria upended regional dynamics and led to a collapse in trafficking between Syria and Jordan from January to April in 2025.²⁵⁰ Assad’s removal also emboldened Jordan’s monarchy to finally crackdown on the JMB, beginning with the mid-April raids and arrests of JMB members involved in drone and missile production. One week later, authorities issued their final decree to outlaw the JMB.²⁵¹

Despite the post-Assad decline, persistent instability in Syria’s southeast Suwayda province has allowed for a resurgence in cross-border trafficking, with at least 39 smuggling attempts between Syria and Jordan over the 110 days between April 4 and July 22, 2025—one every 2.8 days. That rate more than doubled between July 30 and December 13, 2025, when at least 102 cross-border attempts were made over 137 days—one every 1.34 days.²⁵² Since January 2025, Jordanian security forces have killed at least 16 traffickers attempting to cross the border from Syria (see Table 2). Similar to the period before Assad’s overthrow, many of those killed have been al-Ghiyath tribesmen.²⁵³ 

The second increase in smuggling beginning in July 2025 came after a week of clashes in Suwayda province in mid-July between Bedouin tribesmen and the Druze religious community, during which as many as 2,000 people were killed.²⁵⁴ The clashes followed four other rounds of Bedouin-Druze clashes in Suwayda and Damascus provinces, largely the result of disputes over land or local feuds.²⁵⁵

Tensions in the area have been exacerbated by the Druze community’s reluctance to recognize the legitimacy of Syria’s interim government led by Ahmed al-Shara’a, who previously commanded the Salafi-Jihadist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, then al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch. Despite having split from al-Qaeda in 2016–2017, many in HTS continued to view the Druze minority as a heretical cult and a legitimate target for ethno-sectarian cleansing.²⁵⁶ Following the overthrow of Assad, HTS formally dissolved itself, but much of the organization’s former leadership and rank and file retain de facto control of the Syrian state and its institutions. As a result, Druze militias have refused to allow the interim government’s military forces or police to enter Druze parts of the province. On August 6, 2025, Druze spiritual leader Hikmat al-Hajari went so far as to declare an autonomous republic in Druze parts of Suwayda, with security provided by a new Druze “National Guard.”²⁵⁷ 

Due to limited state capacity in the months since the overthrow of Assad, the interim government relied on a number of nonstate armed groups to help confront Druze forces during the mid-July 2025 fighting, in particular factions of Bedouin tribesmen from provinces outside Suwayda who quickly mobilized thousands of troops that deployed to the front line.²⁵⁸ These factions possessed no formal mandate and were commanded by tribal leaders, many of whom possess their own sordid history of trafficking.²⁵⁹ 

Since the fighting ended, many of these factions remain stationed on the front line and have become one of the de facto powers enforcing the interim government’s control over Bedouin parts of Suwayda. Even prior to the fighting, Rakan al-Khudayr’s AFT had become a formal arm of the interim government: In February 2025, the AFT became a faction of the General Security Service, a militarized police unit under the country’s Ministry of Interior.²⁶⁰ 

In the aftermath of Assad’s overthrow, many observers proclaimed that the era of Iran’s influence in Syria had ended, as Tehran’s capacity to project its influence and create push factors had been dealt a huge blow by its loss of Syria as a link between its proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. However, lingering pull factors in both the West Bank and southern Syria have been sufficient over the last year to ensure that a steady supply of arms and narcotics continue to flow across both the Syrian-Jordanian and Jordanian-Israeli borders. 

In October 2025, Israeli security forces made another large seizure of high-quality explosives—equivalent in size of those in March, June, and November 2024. Like those previous busts, this seizure was allegedly overseen by IRGC-QF commander Asghar Bagheri.²⁶¹ Should the various pull factors persist in the West Bank, Jordan, and southern Syria, reports of similar seizures of comparable size may continue into the future.