Turkey will help Iraq’s Kurdish Region Government send troops to relieve fighters in the Syrian town of Kobani, the New York Times reports. Syrian Kurdish fighters have slowly beaten back Islamic State forces, which almost overran the town last week, with the help of intense U.S. air strikes and, now, 24 tons of U.S.-dropped aid from the Iraqi Kurds. In order to get from Iraqi Kurdistan to Kobani, you have to go through either Islamic State–controlled territory or Turkey — the Turkish government is now going to let Kurdish peshmerga fighters do the latter.
Over the past couple weeks, the Obama administration repeatedly asked Turkey, which has forces just over the Syrian border monitoring the situation, to come to the rescue of the Kurds. Turkey refused, as the Kurdish Syrian rebels are linked to insurgent groups in Turkey (though those insurgents are currently in a ceasefire with the Turkish government) and the Turkish government just doesn’t like Kurds, period, and has only limited objections to the Islamic State. So they were not publicly pleased with the U.S.’s decision to aid the Kurds, but they’ve finally come around anyway. It’s not clear exactly why they changed their mind, but Turkey’s large Kurdish had launched large and violent protests about the issue, as the Guardian points out — Turkish indifference undid some of the progress the government and Kurdish nationalists had made in getting along over the past decade or so.