By Jonathon Burch

ISTANBUL, Turkey – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday the Kurdistan Region of Iraq would be sending 200 of its Peshmerga fighters through Turkey to reinforce Kurdish rebels in the Syrian border town of Kobane who have been resisting a siege by Islamic State (ISIS).

The Kurdistan Region overwhelmingly approved on Wednesday a proposal to send the Peshmerga. However, officials did not release details on the number of soldiers to be deployed.

“I learned yesterday that they have finally agreed on a number of 200,” state-run Anadolu news agency quoted Erdogan as saying at a news conference during a visit to Latvia.

ISIS jihadists have laid siege to Kobane, which sits hard on Turkey's border, for the past five weeks in an attempt to strengthen their grip along the frontier. Scores of U.S.-led coalition air strikes on ISIS positions over the past month have helped stop the town from falling but have not been enough to drive the militants out.

The deployment of Peshmerga with heavy weapons could be a turning point in the battle for the town, where lightly-armed Kurdish fighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG) have been battling the jihadists armed with tanks and armoured vehicles looted from Iraqi and Syrian bases.

Turkey announced it would give passage to the Peshmerga earlier this week following secret negotiations between the Kurdistan Region, U.S. and Turkish officials and the political arm of the YPG, the Democratic Union Party (PYD). The move was seen as a dramatic shift by Ankara who had for weeks resisted calls to come to the aid of the town's defenders.

Turkey is giving refuge to some 200,000 mainly Kurdish refugees who have fled the area around Kobane in recent weeks on top of the 1.5 million other Syrians that have arrived over the past three-and-a-half years. It has also treated wounded YPG fighters on Turkish soil.

Turkey is wary of directly helping the PYD because of its close links to the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting the Turkish state for 30 years. It views both groups as terrorist organisations.

The United States this week airdropped weapons, ammunition and medical supplies to the Kurdish fighters, who are now also battling alongside some other units from the Free Syrian Army, a loose grouping of rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Although U.S. President Barack Obama had informed Erdogan about the airdrop, several Turkish leaders have since publicly criticised the move.

“Did Turkey view this business regarding the weapons positively? No, it did not. America did this in spite of Turkey. And I told them, 'right now, Kobane is not strategic for you, if anything it is strategic for us and we are also the ones who should be displaying sensitivities on this subject’,” Anadolu quoted Erdogan as saying on Thursday.

Rudaw