Antoine Kassis faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years and up to life in prison when he is scheduled to be sentenced on July 2, after a federal jury convicted the Lebanese-Syrian man on narco-terrorism charges on Monday, the U.S. Justice Department said.
The 59-year-old, who lives in Lebanon, is a “drug trafficker, who used his high-level access to the Syrian government under the Assad regime to traffic cocaine and weapons,” the federal government said. “Kassis laundered the proceeds of his drug trafficking through the organization of a Colombian co-conspirator.”
“Even after the fall of the Assad regime, Kassis had access to weapons previously provided to the Assad regime by foreign governments, including Russia and Iran,” the Justice Department said. “Since April 2024, Kassis and co-conspirators, who were based in Colombia and Mexico, agreed to supply military-grade weapons diverted from the Assad regime in Syria to the National Liberation Army, in exchange for hundreds of kilograms of cocaine.”
The army, or the ELN, is a Colombia terror group that is “dedicated to the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Colombia,” the department added.
It added that Kassis “stated that he was a cousin of former Syrian president Bashar Assad, and that he was working directly with general Maher Assad, the brother of the former Syrian president, and other top military officials in Syria.”
