Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of reports that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is involved in the trafficking of Captagon across the Middle East.

The production and smuggling of captagon is a multi-billion dollar trade, essentially emanating from Assad-regime control within Syria. This trade is destabilising the region and provides illicit revenue to multiple malign actors, notably the Assad regime and its co-conspirators, including Hizballah and other Iranian-backed militias. The UK has drawn international attention to this (through an intervention at the UN Security Council on 25 January) and increased our cooperation with regional states to combat this. We have made clear our concerns about the malign activity of Hizballah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, both organisations we have sanctioned in their entirety.