For the first time since Assad’s fall, Syria has a full parliament—and among the 70 members appointed by President Ahmad al-Sharaa is a well-known Assyrian voice: Gabriel Moushe Gawrieh, political director of the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO). The appointment was announced today, July 1, 2026.
With this, the first composition of the Syrian People’s Assembly (Majlis al-Sha’ab) following the fall of the Baath regime is finally complete. Two-thirds of the 210 seats—140 in total—have been filled over the past year through indirect elections in various provinces, while the remaining third—70 members—have been appointed directly by the president in accordance with the constitutional declaration. The intent behind the presidential quota was to compensate for groups that would otherwise have risked being left without representation, since the electoral process had proven to have little impact on the representation of both women and Christian minorities. Among the names in the decree, read aloud by Election Commission Chairman Mohammed Taha al-Ahmad, is now Gabriel Moushe.
For anyone who has followed the Assyrians’ political struggle in Syria, the name is nothing new. Gabriel Moushe was born in 1962 in Qamishli, studied agricultural engineering at the University of Aleppo, and in the 2000s became one of the leading figures in the ADO—the oldest Assyrian political party in Syria, founded as early as 1957.
In December 2013, Moushe was arrested by the Syrian security services in Qamishli and was imprisoned for two and a half years, a detention that was condemned by Assyrian organizations, human rights groups, and several countries, including the United States. He was released in 2016 and has continued to represent ADO ever since.
The question, of course, is what a single seat in a 210-member assembly can actually accomplish—especially given that Assyrian villages in the Khabur area continue to live in uncertainty, that the Assyrian language is omitted from new government signs in Hasakeh, and that churches and graves have been repeatedly attacked over the past year. But after more than a century of being excluded from the rooms where Syria’s future is shaped, their very presence serves as a reminder that the Assyrians do not intend to allow themselves to be rendered invisible in the new Syria.
