The Turkish government faces a major dilemma in Iraq after the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) raided its Mosul consulate and took 49 of its personnel hostage, including its consul general, in addition to 31 others. The hostages are just one element of the crisis facing Turkey: The sweep by ISIS that netted it Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city with a population of 1.8 million, as well as Saddam Hussein’s birthplace, Tikrit, threaten to plunge Iraq into a civil war from which the ramifications will be felt in Turkey for years to come. Already, the Syrian civil war has led some 1 million to seek refuge in Turkey.

As it decides what to do about Iraq and its hostages, Turkey has to balance a myriad of factors. The hostage crisis has two dimensions: foreign and domestic. On the foreign side of the ledger, the Syrian and Iraqi theaters of civil conflict have now finally meshed into a single one. Turkey had been heavily engaged in the civil war that pits Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and a series of opposition groups, some moderate and others jihadist. ISIS is a hybrid organization: an offshoot of al-Qaeda, opposed to Assad and yet has chosen to attack the Syrian opposition often with dreadful consequences for anyone caught up in the fighting. But ISIS has its roots in Iraq and it chose to make its most dramatic splash in its own country.

Ankara was already at odds with Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister. It accused the Iraqi leader of implementing a sectarian, that is, exclusively Shiite policy that alienated many Sunnis from Baghdad and Iraq. Ankara’s only allies in the region with any muscle paradoxically are the Kurds in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which Ankara had tried to muzzle for many years.

Domestically, the timing of the ISIS sweep through Iraq could not have come at a worse time for the government of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For a year, Erdogan and the AKP have faced substantial protests, massive corruption allegations, mining tragedies and most recently revolts in the Kurdish provinces in the country’s southeast. Its relations with Europe are in tatters; Washington, which feels obliged to cooperate with Ankara, keeps it at arms length. Looming over everything is a fragile domestic peace process with Turkey’s own Kurds that could fall victim to increased regional and domestic instability. Come August, there will be presidential elections, which Erdogan would very much like to contest and win in the first round.