This article examines how Turkish national identity and otherness have been constructed in mainstream print media in Turkey during the ongoing ethnic conflict. The study applies critical discourse analysis to a sample of 449 news articles published in three leading mainstream dailies, Hürriyet, Milliyet, and Sabah, during a month of intensifying conflict between Turkish security forces and PKK militants in 2015. I identify five forms of discourse used to discursively construct national identity and otherness: military-legal, national-symbolic, cultural-ethical, dramatic-emotional, and ethnic. Together, these discourses construct a Turkish national identity while reinforcing the ‘other’ as illegitimate, non-national, unethical, inhumane, and non-Turk.