Syria elects new parliament Speaker
Shafaq News- Damascus
Syria's parliament elected lawmaker Abdul Hamid Aqil Al-Awak as speaker on Sunday after he secured 99 votes during the inaugural session, attended by Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa, Higher Committee for People's Assembly Elections Chairman Mohammad Taha Al-Ahmad, and several ministers.
Three lawmakers contested the post: Abdul Hamid Aqil Al-Awak, Muayyad Hayel Al-Qablaoui, and Mohammad Ramez Koraj.
Al Jazeera reported that 206 of the assembly’s 210 members attended the sitting. Al-Awak received 99 votes, while Muayyad Hayel Al-Qablaoui won 75 and Mohammad Ramez Koraj received 31. Three lawmakers from Al-Suwayda were absent, and Idlib representative Mohammad Kulthum had died of a heart attack in mid-June.
According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), the sitting was chaired by the assembly’s oldest member, Osama Al-Assaf. He said the current phase aims to “open a new chapter in rebuilding the nation and write a new history that teaches future generations the meaning of dignity.”
Born in 1966, Al-Awak graduated in law from the University of Aleppo in 1990, earned a master's degree in administrative law from the Islamic University in Lebanon in 2009, and later obtained a doctorate in constitutional law from Beirut Arab University. He served as director of legal affairs at the Tigris and Khabur Basin Directorate from 1993 to 1998, worked as a judge at Syria's Justice Ministry for a decade, and has been an assistant professor at Mardin Artuklu University since 2016. He also served on the committee that drafted Syria's Constitutional Declaration.
