Golan Druze Rally for Syria's Assad

At least 2,000 Druze in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights demonstrated on Saturday in a show of support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, Israeli news website Ynet reported.

It said that marchers in the village of Buqata carried giant Syrian flags and portraits of Assad, whose security forces have been dealing harshly with protesters demanding political reform, killing at least nine people on Friday.

"We came out today to support the leader of our homeland, whom people are trying to hamper in running the country," Ynet quoted Golan resident Yosef Safdi as saying.

Israeli police did not intervene other than to direct traffic away from the demonstration route, it added.

In the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war and unilaterally annexed in 1981, there are about 18,000 Syrian nationals, most of them Druze.

Syria and Israel remain technically in a state of war.

Followers of a breakaway sect of Islam concentrated in Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, the Druze are not considered Muslims by most of the Islamic world.