The Daily Beast reports: Within sight of an unoccupied watchtower, and a couple of hundred meters from the border gate at Akcakale on the Syrian-Turkish border, two small girls are skipping on stacks of piping ready for shipment to the town of Tel Abyad, now controlled by the Islamic State, or ISIS, across what the Turks claim is a locked-down frontier.

It is the weekend and so in this slow-paced, dusty border town, decorated with multi-colored banners and pennants of Turkish political parties campaigning for next month’s parliamentary polls, no one is hurrying to transport the suspicious cargo. And so here the pipes, several meters long and three inches in diameter, remain.

Around the corner there are more pipes — larger ones, six inches in diameter. Smugglers say the piping can sustain high pressure and will be used by jihadists in Syria to manufacture pipe bombs, improvised explosive devices and launch-tubes for mortars. [Continue reading…]