Nabil Fawaz was born in Raqqa on 26 May 1948. He read law in Damas from 1967 to 1970 and fulfilled his military service obligation from 1970 to 1975. Mr Fawaz worked at the Ministry of the Economy until 1980, when he was incarcerated in the desert detention centre in Sednaya under Hafez al-Assad’s regime until his 1995 release. An intellectual and member of the Syrian Democratic People’s Party, he was involved in the 2011 uprising in Raqqa. When the city was liberated in 2013, he was elected mayor of Raqqa, where he served until ISIS’s arrival. He lived as a political refugee in Turkey from 2014 to 2017, before moving to France as a political refugee on 9 July 2017, where he has since lived with his family.