Having apparently lulled Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) into a false sense of security, ISIS launched a series of 15 simultaneous attacks across their frontier today, testing their defenses and seizing some small villages.

Also part of the slain territory was the town of Qara Tappa, not far from the major ISIS city of Mosul, where ISIS fighters infiltrated the town disguised as Peshmerga, and then fought off Kurdish reinforcements.

The attacks appeared to coincide with Turkey’s announcement that they are going to allow Peshmerga fighters to traverse Turkey to enter Syria and fight ISIS over Kurdish territory there.

With ISIS focused on the Syrian Kurds and the Iraqi Anbar Province lately, there hadn’t been much fighting with the Peshmerga, which would free them up to fight elsewhere. ISIS attacks today may aim at changing that equation, or may reflect that, with US airstrikes focused elsewhere, the Kurdish territory isn’t as defensible as it once was.