Syria's first parliament since the fall of Bashar al-Assad held its opening session in Damascus on Sunday, and Türkiye welcomed it the same week as an important step toward a Syrian state built by Syrians. The 210-seat People's Assembly seated members who took the constitutional oath before President Ahmed al-Sharaa, and elected a speaker, the country's first attempt at representative government after 13 years of war and decades of Baathist rule.
The chamber is a hybrid. Two-thirds of the seats, 140, were filled through provincial electoral bodies, and the remaining 70 were appointed by al-Sharaa, under a temporary system meant to carry the country to a permanent constitution. According to Anadolu Ajansı, 206 of the 210 members attended the first session; three seats for the southern province of Suwayda were left empty, kept open for the province to fill later. The lawmakers chose Abdul Hamid Aqil al-Awak as speaker. He is a legal scholar from Hasakah who drafted Syria's interim constitutional declaration and, since 2016, has taught at Mardin Artuklu University in southeastern Türkiye, one of many threads tying the new order in Damascus to its northern neighbor.
Türkiye's Foreign Ministry said the assembly, "which brings together different segments of Syrian society," would help build stability "through an inclusive system of governance," and pledged continued support "on the basis of Syria's territorial integrity and unity." That last phrase is the one Ankara returns to in every statement on Syria, a warning against any settlement that would carve out an autonomous zone in the northeast.
For Syria's Türkmen, the session marked something without precedent. Türkmen lawmakers hold seats for the first time at this level, and Abdurrahman Mustafa, who heads the Syrian Turkmen Assembly, framed the moment as a claim to belonging rather than a favor granted. "We are Türkmen and at the same time Syrian. We are not guests in this country. We have lived on this land for a thousand years," he said, calling for "a Syria where no one is excluded, where everyone sees themselves as a partner." He argued for administrative rather than political decentralization, on the grounds that strong local government serves the country's unity instead of fracturing it.
The composition carries its own signals. The assembly seated Kurdish, Christian, Circassian and Druze members, and, by Anadolu's account, none of its Kurdish lawmakers is tied to the SDF, the YPG-led force Ankara treats as the Syrian arm of the PKK. Much rests on what the body actually does. It was appointed and elected under rules the government wrote, it meets with three provinces short of full representation, and its first real test, a permanent constitution, is still ahead.