Turkey made a significant policy shift Monday when it announced it would allow Kurdish Peshmerga fighters from northern Iraq to travel through the Turkish territory to reinforce the besieged Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria.

The announcement was all the more striking, because earlier this month Turkey's President equated the Kurdish militants defending Kobani to the ISIS fighters who were laying siege to the town. Both the Kurdish and ISIS militants are, in the words of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, "terrorists."

"Turkey feels like it has fallen into the subway tracks and is surrounded by live rails," said Hugh Pope, senior Turkey analyst with the International Crisis Group, a conflict mediation organization. "It is very difficult for Turkey to make any choice."

Turkey to let Iraqi Kurds use its territory to reinforce Kobani

Turkey's historically troubled relations with its own ethnic Kurdish population is one reason Ankara balked at joining the U.S.-led coalition bombing the militants who call themselves the Islamic State.

But Turkey's noninterference policy came at a cost.

The scenes of Kurdish and ISIS fighters locked in a death struggle on the border, as well as the images of more than 100,000 desperate Syrian Kurds fleeing to Turkish territory, triggered spasms of deadly violence between rival factions within Turkey.

Kurdish politicians in Turkey accused the Turkish government of siding with ISIS by refusing to arm Kobani's defenders. Kurds then took to the streets in protest.

More than 30 people were killed in cities around Turkey this month as ethnic Kurds clashed with Islamist and nationalist groups as well as Turkish police.

"All of these constituencies are getting fired up by the scenes on television that they're seeing in the Middle East," said Pope of the International Crisis Group. "This has led for the first time in 20 years to gangs taking to the streets and killing each other."

(CNN)