A senior Arab diplomat who followed the Geneva II conference in its first days said that the current impasse was evident from the outset, and that the way out was clear to the conference’s broker, Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi.
The diplomat, who left the Swiss city of Montreux two days after the conference opened on Jan. 22, told Al-Monitor that Brahimi was never deluded about the talks' prospects. Before the conference began, Brahimi had conducted many contacts with the Syrian forces involved as well as with the foreign powers sponsoring the conference and those supporting any of the parties to the Syrian conflict. So Brahimi went to Montreux fully aware of what awaited him. He knew that the two sides’ working papers didn’t intersect on any of the basic points.
