On July 25, 1950, one month after the Korean War broke out, the first democratically elected new government of Turkey announced its decision to send a brigade to join the United Nations Command in Korea, even without asking the approval of the Grand National Assembly. From 1950 to 1953, four annually rotated Turkish brigades served on the Korea Peninsula. Why did Turkey send troops to a seemingly irrelevant conflict thousands of miles away? Existing literature is confined to Turkey’s developing relations with the U.S. and Turkey’s NATO membership. Yet equally important Turkish domestic aspects have long been neglected by English-language accounts. Drawing on a largely diversified body of public and private sources in Turkey, the US, China and the UN archives, this paper argues that the newly elected Democratic Party used Turkey’s participation in the Korean War to consolidate legitimacy and gave space for the public and soldiers to express their religious identities. Through content analysis of the recently available archival documents from Turkish Military archive (Genelkurmay Askeri Tarih ve Strateji Etüt), memoirs of Kore Gaziler and tabur imamlar?, Turkish newspapers’ coverage on Hürriyet, Cumhuriyet, Ak?am, Vatan, Zafer, Ulus, Yeni Sabah and Milliyet, Turkish government statements, photo collections, oral histories and interviews with Kore Gaziler, this paper suggests that Turkey’s road to the Korean War was framed as a religious necessity to defend Turkish vatan against atheist communists. Turkish Military played a pivotal role in the religious framing. It distributed the religious propaganda published by the Diyanet (The Directorate of Religious Affairs) to Turkish Brigades and sent civilian imams accompanying the troops in Korea. This research contributes both to the histories of the Korean War by focusing on Turkish Brigades and especially civilian imams who remain largely ignored, and Turkish studies by examining the role of myth (the legend of the Turk in Korea) and the “Other” (atheist communists) played in the formation of religious national identity when Turkish government brought Islam from the periphery to the centre as the antidote of communism.