The man chosen to run Syria's new parliament spent the last ten years as a professor inside Türkiye. In its opening session in Damascus on Sunday, the People's Assembly elected Abdul Hamid Aqil al-Awak as its speaker, and he took the post with 99 of the 205 votes cast, ahead of two rival candidates. Since 2016 he has taught political science and international relations at Mardin Artuklu University, in the southeastern Turkish city of Mardin, a short drive from the Syrian border.
It is not a ceremonial choice. Al-Awak is a legal scholar from Hasakah in Syria's northeast who took his law degree at the University of Aleppo, moved to Mardin after leaving Syria, and spent his years there on the exact problem now in front of him. He trained members of the Syrian opposition's constitutional committee, and after Assad fell he chaired the body that drafted Syria's temporary constitutional declaration. As speaker he is set to steer the assembly's debates on a permanent constitution, which puts a man shaped in a Turkish university at the center of Syria's legal transition.
Ankara did not miss the moment. Türkiye's ambassador to Damascus, Nuh Yılmaz, posted within hours that Syria was living "a historic day," telling the country's people that they had waited decades and paid hundreds of thousands of lives to reclaim popular sovereignty. "The voice of the people is the voice of the truth," he wrote. "May it be blessed."
The session itself was ceremonial. Members of the People's Assembly took their oaths in Damascus, with President Ahmad al-Sharaa presiding and his foreign, interior and justice ministers in the room, along with the ambassadors of a number of foreign states as guests of honor. Sharaa used his address to call for "a new chapter" in Syrian history. "Today, Syria is writing a new chapter in its history, one that reflects its civilization, values and heritage," he said, according to the state news agency SANA, urging the chamber to become "a model of responsibility and competence."
The body that convened is a transitional one, built to legislate for the period after Assad's fall in 2024 and set by the interim constitution to serve 30 months. It has 210 seats. Regional electoral colleges chose two-thirds of them last October, and Sharaa named the final 70 himself under Decree No. 143, al-Awak among them, before the chamber elected him to the chair. The Mardin thread runs further down the roster: three students from the same university were also among the president's appointees. With the 70 seated, the chamber's membership rose from 140 to 210, though the seat of an İdlib member who died and three seats held for Suweida province sit empty for now.
Sharaa's appointment power was also meant to fix a gap the vote had left. In the electoral-college rounds, women took only six seats and minority candidates ten, so officials said the president would use his picks to rebalance the chamber. His 70 included 15 women and 13 people who had been imprisoned under Assad. That still leaves the assembly weighted toward a president who both shaped the committees that ran the elections and named a third of its members outright, and Syrian civil-society groups have said as much, calling the design structurally flawed. Their objection belongs to them, and it sits alongside the milestone rather than erasing it.
The map explains the empty chairs. Suweida, the Druze-majority southern province, has stayed outside state control since sectarian fighting killed roughly 1,700 people there last July, so its electoral colleges never met. In the north, voting slipped by seven months in parts of Raqqa and Hassakeh, the areas government forces took at the start of this year from the SDF, the YPG-led militia that is the PKK's Syrian affiliate. More than 20 Kurdish political parties rejected the lawmakers the colleges selected in May, calling the process one of exclusion, and their complaint is on the record as theirs.
That northern thread is the one Ankara watches most closely, and it is moving Türkiye's way. The ceasefire between Damascus and the SDF is being implemented in pieces: four SDF brigades have folded into government forces and drawn state salaries, and some 1,300 SDF-linked detainees have been released, part of the slow absorption of the group into a single Syrian army that Türkiye has pressed for throughout. That backing has run well beyond the military track, into reconstruction and into the diplomatic rehabilitation that saw Washington drop Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism after talks in Ankara.
The United Nations put the moment plainly. Its deputy special envoy, Claudio Cordone, told the Security Council that Syria's transition was "at a critical phase, with opportunity and fragility existing side-by-side," and that the country needed the assembly to start work and all Syrians to feel represented in it. Ankara has bet on the opportunity half of that sentence. Its envoy's blessing on Sunday, and the Mardin professor now holding the gavel in Damascus, are the shape that bet takes.