The political weakness of those powers – whether global actors like the United States or regional players like Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia – has led to a remarkable role reversal in the region’s power dynamic. Although the US and the European Union still classify the pro-independence Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as a terrorist organization (whose founder, Abdullah Öcalan, has been in prison in Turkey since 1999), only the PKK’s fighters, it seems, are willing and able to stop the Islamic State’s further advance.