posted a photo on its official Instagram feed of embattled President Bashar al-Assad seen posing with a Turkish woman giving him a flag on which is printed a Turkish Communist Party (TKP) slogan used during Turkey’s summer protests.Umut Kıraç from the TKP, who visited Assad as part of a delegation of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) on Tuesday, is seen in the photo giving Assad the flag with the “Boyun eğme” (Do not surrender) slogan printed on it.
The slogan became popular when protesters hung a large flag bearing it from the top of the Atatürk Cultural Center facing İstanbul’s famed Taksim Square, the flashpoint of the summer protests. It also drew Ankara’s anger when German magazine Der Spiegel featured the slogan as the headline of a 10-page cover story on the protests written in Turkish.
In Turkey, thousands shared the photo on the social media to criticize the protesters known as “Gezici”, a popular tag Turks use to describe demonstrators linked with Gezi protests.