Relations between Turkey and the KRG soured after the Turks failed to help when the Islamic State threatened the KRG’s capital Erbil in August 2014. The KDP controls Erbil and Dohuk provinces, but not the other Kurdish province, Sulaymaniyah (often referred to as “Suli” or “Slemani”), which has been a stronghold of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). An offshoot of the PUK, called Gorran, has become a player in Sulaymaniyah as well. The PUK is said to be less tribal, more cosmopolitan, and more willing to deal with Baghdad than the KDP. The family of Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who served as president of Iraq following Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, is the major player in the PUK. The security forces of the two parties fought a brief civil war in the mid-1990s, during which thousands were killed. Even though the two sides have apparently let bygones be bygones, the wounds have not entirely healed. Much of this has to do with the fact that the PUK (and Gorran) do not want to allow the KDP to dominate Iraqi Kurdistan and other parts of the Kurdish world, which is where things get interesting.

The KDP’s Barzani has colluded with Turkey against the PKK and was noticeably slow to send assistance to Syria’s Kurds during the Islamic State’s siege of Kobani. This is because Barzani wants to be the king of the Kurds and does not want to upset Ankara, which is important to Kurdish independence in northern Iraq. The PUK, wary of the Turks and Barzani’s dominance, has coordinated with the PKK to balance both Ankara and Erbil. In Syria this meant that the PKK helped the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD)—allied with the PUK—and set up the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, after the Syrian uprising began. The YPG has been in the news a lot lately because its fighters—men and women as the press likes to point out—have been effective against the Islamic State and have become an ally of the United States. Here is where it gets even more interesting.

As I implied just above, the ties between the YPG and the PKK are closer than the commonly used term “affiliated” would suggest. This has made life difficult for the American policymakers who correctly insist that Turkey has a right to defend itself against the PKK, while at the same time insisting on coordinating with the YPG against the Islamic State. This is an affront to the Turks who fear that the PYD, the YPG, and the PKK will carve out an independent entity in northern Syria, leaving what amounts to a terrorist state on its southern border with its eyes on southeastern Turkey.

The Obama administration has tried hard to maintain the fiction that the YPG and PKK are distinct entities, but this has convinced absolutely no one. Even as American diplomats were claiming last summer that they were making progress bringing the Turks around to the way the United States viewed the YPG, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was declaring that Ankara would never accept what the Kurds call Rojava, meaning Western Kurdistan, which covers northern Syria. So now the Turks are shelling YPG positions in Syria while the YPG continues to coordinate with the United States as well as Russia, leading Turkish officials to conclude that both Washington and Moscow are colluding against Turkey. The Turks want the United States to choose between them or the YPG (and by extension the PKK). It is a bind for American officials. They can either sign up with the Turks, thereby undermining what they have going with the YPG against the Islamic State, or ditch Turkey altogether. Neither serves U.S. interests, so the administration has split the difference.