This paper examines rhetoric in news stories in the lead-up to and execution of Operation Sun (Gunes Harekati) in the Turkish mainstream daily paper Hurriyet between October 2007 and February of 2008. The choices to study press, news stories, and Hurriyet in particular are discussed and a contextualization of four key dynamics in Turkish society is provided: the relationship between the Turkish republic and the military, the history of Kurds in Turkey, the relationship between the US and Turkey, and the rise of Islam in contemporary Turkey. Moving to the press coverage, key narrative themes arising from the operation are identified and located in terms of subject position along a proposed spectrum of identification/othering. Such themes include the extremely distinct positions of martyrs (soldiers who died for Turkey) and traitors (PKK members who should be killed), which represent profound othering and offer little opportunity for identification with one another. Internally intermediate positions represented by narratives of the homeland, eight captured Turkish soldiers, a Kurdish political party (the DTP), and a Turkish pop star who spoke out on the war (Bulent Ersoy) all offer some possibility of narrative stepping stones for identification between the two extremes. Narratives regarding the US and the Iraqi Kurds suggest that yet a third category, the extra-societal other, has a large role in the dynamic of identification/othering: this is the unpredictable, unknowable other, a position which, viewed retrospectively, suggests that the distance between martyr and traitor would not be as great as it initially appears. The discussion is informed by the literature of propaganda studies and by psychological and sociological approaches to othering. Noting a general trend in propaganda studies to find that which is searched for, namely propaganda, this paper attempts to move beyond such an outlook and identify possible sites for identification within what could certainly be called a propagandistic, nationalistic set of texts. With this end in mind, the paper concludes with a discussion about the implications of such an approach for propaganda studies in general.