The latest issue of a children’s magazine published by the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs, a government service and the country’s highest national religious body, contains a series of cartoons glorifying martyrdom. The colourful cartoons in the book feature parents talking with young children that promotes the idea of religious martyrdom. “May god bless our martyrs, may their graves be full with holy light’, says one caption, with another reading ‘How good is it to be a martyr…to gain the right to go to heaven’. In another box a little girk can be seen saying ‘I wish I could be a martyr’ with her mother responding that if she desired it enough Allah would grant it to her! Another statement near the last picture reads: ‘Our prophet says: a martyr feels the pain of dying as much as you feel pain when being pinched’. Turkish psychologist and professor Dr. Serdar Degirmencioglu criticised the kid’s magazine issue, but added that indoctrinating children into ideas of radical Islam has been a policy by the Turkish government for a long time. ‘They want to use the drawings to transfer the message of martyrdom to children because they think it will be more attractive,’ he said in an interview with the Turkish Evrensel newspaper adding that the idea of martyrdom promoted by the government describes it as a ‘painless death and a promise of heaven.’