A federal judge sentenced 59-year-old Antoine Kassis to 30 years in prison today, locking away a major middleman who bridged the gap between Middle Eastern weapons stockpiles and South American drug cartels.
Kassis, a dual Lebanese-Syrian national, received a 30-year sentence for narco-terrorism conspiracy and a concurrent 20-year sentence for conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Court records and trial evidence revealed that Kassis used high-level access to the Syrian government under the Assad regime to run a massive cocaine and arms trafficking network. Even after the Assad regime fell, Kassis maintained access to military-grade weapons that foreign governments, including Russia and Iran, had previously supplied to Syria.
The operation unraveled after federal investigators uncovered a deal struck in April 2024. Kassis and his co-conspirators in Mexico and Colombia agreed to divert Syrian military weapons to the National Liberation Army (ELN), a group designated by the U.S. Secretary of State as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization.
The ELN is actively involved in attempting to violently overthrow the democratically elected government of Colombia. In exchange for the weapons, the ELN agreed to supply Kassis with hundreds of kilograms of cocaine.
During the deal, Kassis claimed he was a cousin of former Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. He stated he worked directly with General Maher Al-Assad—the former president’s brother—and other top Syrian military officials to secure the weapons.
Trial evidence showed that Kassis paid the Syrian government $10,000 for every kilogram of cocaine brought through the Port of Latakia. The evidence also detailed how the Assad regime raised funds by charging checkpoint taxes on illegal drugs moving through its territory and by manufacturing and distributing Captagon, a Schedule I controlled substance.
To finalize the logistics, Kassis traveled from Lebanon to Kenya to meet with an ELN weapons inspector. He then signed a contract to import a shipping container of fruit from Colombia to the Port of Latakia, intending for the shipment to hide 500 kilograms of cocaine.
Kassis planned to manage the distribution of the drugs across the Middle East, while his partners laundered the profits. Court documents showed that these co-conspirators laundered nearly $100,000,000 in less than 18 months for various criminal entities, including Hamas and the Sinaloa Cartel.
The international investigation was spearheaded by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Special Operations Division Bilateral Investigations Unit. The DEA received local support from its offices in Bogota, Cartagena, Accra, Rabat, Nairobi, Amman, Istanbul, Panama City, Mexico City, and Madrid.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs worked closely with Kenyan authorities to arrest Kassis and secure his extradition to the United States in May 2025. Additional assistance was provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Colombia’s Cuerpo Técnico de Investigación, Ghana’s Narcotics Control Commission and Police Service, Morocco’s General Directorate for National Security, and Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
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