This presentation investigates the way “Islamist” voters in Turkey discuss ISIS/DAESH, and particularly the “conspiracy theories” they typically use to account for the group's behavior and origins – especially accounts in which the group operates at the behest of a non-Muslim power. My research centers around ethnographic interviews with voters who, in 2015, had supported the ruling AK Party in more than one national election. My argument, following Leon Festinger's classic theory of cognitive dissonance, is that such conspiracy theories owe their existence less to unconventional sets of informational assumptions than to motivated cognition. Outlining how my interviews demonstrated that anxiety concerning an embattled Muslim identity already figured prominently within my subjects' emotive schemata, and particularly how the horrific violence of a group ostensibly motivated by the religion that forms the core of their own identity visibly distressed them, I proceed to explain Festinger's theory. Festinger explained that people who learn something (a “cognition”) that contradicts another cognition (especially one supporting their self-esteem) experience an uncomfortable feeling of dissonance which they will be motivated to reduce or eliminate – usually by changing one of the dissonant cognitive elements. In this case, the detailed interviews show why abandoning the cognition that “ISIS' actions are reprehensible” or jettisoning their own identification with Islam are both non-starters for my subjects. Hence, the easiest element to alter is that “ISIS is motivated by Islam.” I argue that positing a neo-imperialist, non-Muslim power (the US, Russia, or Israel) as responsible not only reduces dissonance by absolving Islam from precipitating evil, but also aligns with existing antipathies. In short, the cognition that “bad” causes (imperialism) lead to “bad” results (ISIS) is less dissonant (and hence less desirable) than the cognition that “good” causes (Islam) lead to “bad” results (ISIS). Moreover, I argue that vacillation between reproaching ISIS for misconstruing Islam and insisting that ISIS is entirely operated by non-Muslims suggests incomplete confidence in narratives that subjects would like to believe. All told, I argue, the conspiracy theories about ISIS attract “Islamists” less on their factual merits than because of motivated cognition based on cognitive dissonance. I conclude by exploring the paradox of how the international community can recruit local allies against ISIS when antipathy towards it among locals is so intense they can only understand it to be the work of those same international players.