Within 24 hours of installing a giant billboard in a central square in Tehran which featured fifty women wearing the hijab under the slogan “Women of my land”, authorities in Iran were forced to taken it down on Friday, Guardian reported.
The billboard controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was met with massive outrage as women pictured in the poster objected to their image being misused for propaganda.
Releasing a video, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, a multiaward-winning actor said: “I am not considered a woman in a land where young children, little girls and freedom-loving youths are killed in its fields.”
Read more: Explained: Iran’s morality police, hijab and violent protests over woman’s death
“I am Mahsa’s mother, I am Sarina’s mother. I am the mother of all the children who were killed in this land. I am the mother of all the land of Iran, not a woman in the land of murderers,” Fatemeh Motamed-Arya asserted in a video where she was seen without a hijab.
This was followed by film director Marzieh Boroumand and mountaineer Parvaneh Kazemi condemning the use of their image on the billboard.
Shortly after, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps reinstated the billboard with the same wording, but without any photographs.
Massive protests in Iran started after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last month. Amnesty said on Friday that at least 23 children had been killed during the protests and so far 144 people have been killed though the true death toll was higher.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his toughest warning yet to the protesters, said on Friday that no one should dare think they can uproot the Islamic Republic.
