A particularly disturbing report which aired on ABC News on Tuesday night indicated that fighters in Syria and Yemen are arming themselves with non-metallic explosive devices which could evade detection. Those fighters, many of whom are Western and may even have access to American passports, may be preparing attacks on the United States.

Via American Power Blog:

“One official now calls Syria the new university for terrorism training and bomb making,” ABC correspondent Pierre Thomas reported. “The fear among intelligence officials is that one of the thousands of foreign fighters in Syria, many of them from Western countries, could try to smuggle one of these new generation bombs onto a plane headed for Europe or the U.S.”

Meanwhile, U.S. officials revealed that there is evidence that Syria has begun to conduct airstrikes inside Iraq on Tuesday in an effort to stem the advance of ISIS fighters.

“Officials said the strikes appeared to be the work of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, which is locked in a bloody civil war with opposition groups,” the Associated Press reported. “The target of the attacks was the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has been fighting along with the rebels opposed to Assad and has since moved swiftly across the border into Iraq.”

The failure by the West to contain the Syrian civil war in Syria is rapidly putting the United States on the same side of the struggle against Islamist fighters in the Levant as a brutal dictator who gassed his own people. What a delightful turn of events.