"Second Imia/Kardak"? Pro-Government Turkish Media's Anti-Greek Rhetoric Intensifies with 1996 War-Scare Reference

Turkish pro-government broadcaster CNN Türk on 11 August ran a segment asking whether Greece and Turkey are heading toward a "second Kardak crisis" — a direct reference to the January 1996 Imia/Kardak standoff, when the two NATO allies came to the brink of armed conflict over an uninhabited islet in the Aegean. The choice of language is not incidental. It is the sharpest data point yet in a pattern The Levant Files documented in a special investigation published two days earlier, on 9 August, tracking five weeks of escalating anti-Greek rhetoric across Turkey's pro-government press.

The immediate trigger for the CNN Türk piece was mundane on its face: a ceremony on 8 August marking the handover of two newly built military guesthouses to Greek armed forces personnel on Ro (Kastellorizo group; Karaada in Turkish), an islet roughly two kilometres from the Turkish coastal town of Kaş. But the broadcaster's Athens correspondent, Duygu Leloğlu, framed the event as a calculated signal from Athens that "militarization steps on demilitarized-status islands" would continue — and noted that the Chief of the Hellenic National Defence General Staff, General Dimitrios Houpis, personally attended.

The headline choice matters because of what Kardak/Imia actually was. In January 1996, competing sovereignty claims over the islet brought Greek and Turkish naval forces into a standoff that, by most accounts, came close to open conflict before US mediation defused it. Resurrecting that reference in a headline about a guesthouse ceremony is not neutral reporting; it primes the audience to read a routine — if legally contested — facilities event as the leading edge of a new war scare.

This is not an isolated editorial choice. The Levant Files' 9 August investigation, covering coverage from 12 July to 9 August, identified a hardening pattern across A Haber, Haber7, TRT Haber and Türkiye newspaper, built on five recurring frames: Greece as provocateur; Athens as fearful of Turkish military power; Greek-Israeli defence cooperation as an anti-Turkish axis; Greece as militarily dependent and inadequate; and Athens as an instrument of Western containment of Turkey. Outlets have run headlines describing Greek statements as "arrogant provocation," Athens as gripped by "KAAN panic" over Turkey's indigenous fighter jet, and a Turkish columnist publicly asking "Why won't Greece behave?" while calling Greece a "sacred cow" of the Christian West.

The CNN Türk piece pushes that pattern into new territory: an explicit historical analogy to a militarized near-war crisis, rather than the "panic/fear/provocation" vocabulary The Levant Files catalogued through July and early August. Whether or not CNN Türk intended the headline as more than a rhetorical hook, invoking Kardak amid Greek rearmament, the Aspis Achilleos (Achilles Shield) air-defence programme, and the new Turkey-Saudi-Pakistan defence pact that has already unsettled Athens, reads less as analysis than as an implicit warning.

Notably, even CNN Türk's own reporting undercuts the alarmism embedded in its headline. Leloğlu told the broadcaster that the Greek press itself downplayed the ceremony — presenting it as a routine housing-improvement project — and that mainstream Greek outlets gave it little coverage, evidence, in her own words, that "Athens does not want to provoke Turkey too much" on this front. The gap between that on-the-ground reporting and the "second Kardak crisis" framing in the headline is itself a case study in how Turkish pro-government outlets are constructing threat narratives their own sourcing does not fully support.

The pattern raises a genuine escalation risk. Aegean sovereignty disputes over demilitarized-status islands are a known flashpoint, and 1996 is remembered on both sides of the Aegean as a moment when miscalculation nearly produced war. Media framing that casually reaches for that precedent — while official channels in Ankara and Athens continue to describe a "positive agenda" of dialogue — widens the gap between diplomatic messaging and public sentiment, a gap that has historically made de-escalation harder, not easier, when incidents do occur.