Thousands of people protested today in Antakya (Antioch), Hatay against the fighting in Syria, against military intervention in Syria, and against the Turkish Government’s involvement with and support of Syrian rebels.

A small number of the protesters carried Syrian President Assad’s pictures and shouted slogans supporting him.

The protest was organized by unions and leftist groups. National media put the number of protesters at 3,000 while local media put the number at more than 10,000.

Pictures of the protest can be seen here. Antakya has a population of about 225,000.

At the end of the protest march one of the leaders of the protest made a statement in which he criticized the Turkish Government’s support of only one group (Sunni Arabs) and the government’s allowing rebels and foreigners to freely use Hatay as their base. These government actions, he said, were causing a dramatic increase in incidents, unrest, and sectarian divisions in Hatay, which has a diverse population of Sunnis, Shias, Alevis, Christians, Turks, Arabs and Kurds and is also known for its general lack of sectarian divisions.

Note: Last week Turkish Government officials tried to downplay the increasing number of reports of incidents and unrest in Hatay by saying that those making these claims should not be taken seriously because they were being made people who were from ‘different’ (translation: non-Sunni) ethnicities. This attempt to play the ‘religion card’ was widely criticized.