In an embarrassing gaffe, an Iranian city commemorated the decade-long war with Iraq by placing a photoshopped image of three soldiers, from arch-enemy Israel, on a billboard.
The image, which has since been taken down, was put on display in Shiraz as tribute to the 1980-88 war. Whoever selected the picture obviously didn’t do a good job. Not only do the three soldiers carry distinctive M16 assault rifles but the original photo also featured a fourth female soldier, who was cropped out for the billboard.
The gaffe was quickly spotted and triggered a flurry of mockery online. Even Israel’s Foreign Ministry noted the Iranian snafu on its Persian-language Twitter account.
As of Friday, the photo was replaced with a different picture featuring no soldiers at all. The local authorities ordered an investigation into how the gaffe happened.
The Iran-Iraq war started with Saddam Hussein invading Iran’s south-western Khuzestan Province, hoping for support of the local Arab population and counting on the weakness of the government in Tehran, which was replaced in a revolution a year earlier. Instead one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Middle East followed, hundreds of thousands killed on both sides.
Shiraz, Iran’s fifth-largest city, was one of the targets for Saddam’s forces in what was dubbed ‘War of the Cities’ – a series of air raids and missile attack on major population centers in western Iran.
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