Officials in a major Iranian city have been left red-faced after a billboard, erected in a public square to commemorate “martyrs” from the Iran-Iraq war, was found to have used an image of Israeli soldiers.

As part of the Iranian regime’s annual “Sacred Defence Week”, a large poster was put up in downtown Shiraz, showing three soldiers standing on a rocky outcrop, their backs to the camera, with their heads down.

It included a quote from an Iranian poet, Ali Moalem Damghani: “They stare at me, still glorious, I see their shadow on the mountain.”

However, some of the city’s residents spotted that the soldiers pictured were carrying M16 assault rifles, which are not used by the Iranian army. The picture was subsequently traced back to a website called Unsplash.com – and the original image was found to depict Israeli soldiers – including a female soldier, who had been cropped out of the version used on the Shiraz billboard.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the ruling regime has not recognised Israel, with its leaders regularly calling for the country’s destruction.

The billboard error was widely mocked on social media. The Israeli government’s Farsi language account subsequently noting that the billboard was hurriedly removed overnight.

 

According to local Iranian media, Seyyed Ahmad Dastgheyb, chairman of the Shiraz local government council, had launched an investigation into the incident, saying that if the picture on the poster “is confirmed to be a photo of soldiers serving the usurper Zionist regime, those responsible will be punished in the harshest manner.”