The failure of the Syrian peace talks in Geneva was inevitable. The UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura insisted when delegations starting going their separate ways on Wednesday that the talks had merely been suspended, not abandoned, and that they would resume on February 25. De Mistura would have to say this. UN special envoys seeking to resolve entrenched conflicts have a thankless task. The veteran Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi worked tirelessly to coax the Assad regime to peace talks that it pretended it wanted to attend. Brahimi's challenge was to find a sufficiently coherent opposition voice to sit across from Assad's team. At the urging of Saudi Arabia and the Arab League, opposition figures were finally persuaded to present a united front despite profound difference. But it was all to no avail. Tired and despairing, Brahimi quit in May 2014 after the failure of the last Geneva peace talks. De Mistura had said before the latest round started that he would not have been holding them if he did not think that there was a chance of success. In the febrile atmosphere of such meetings, such a confident tone is designed to calm tempers and prepare both sides for negotiations. The problem this week in Geneva was that there was never a realistic chance of any progress whatsoever. The Russians were said to have indicated that to facilitate negotiations, they would stop their airstrikes on Free Syrian Army positions and persuade Assad to have his troops and his Hezbollah mercenaries cease offensive operations. In the event Moscow did no such thing. It was a ruse. Assad's army has continued to attack, gaining ground with Russian air cover. A wiser man that de Mistura might have realized that however urgently peace was needed for the sake of 11 million suffering Syrians, this was still not the right moment to try and talk. Even when forced onto a back foot two years ago, Bashar Assad had writhed like a slippery eel pretending that he wanted to talk when all he wanted was time and immunity from decisive international action to bring his bloody regime to an end. And tragically he got away with this. But even as Assad's military position is being reinforced by the Russians, his political excuses are being destroyed, literally. It was always his mealy-mouthed contention that the rebellion of his people was actually an attack by outside terrorists. The growth of Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS), which he actively fostered, enabled him to justify this claim. These were indeed foreign terrorists. But the US-led 60-country Coalition, which includes elements from the Kingdom, is destroying Daesh from the air while Iraqi and Kurdish troops are retaking territory that had been lost. So bad have conditions become for the terrorists that numbers of them, including some top leaders, have fled to Libya where Daesh controls some 200 kilometers of coastal area around Muammar Gaddafi's old hometown of Sirte and are infiltrating into the capital Tripoli while raiding and destroying oil facilities. As Daesh in Syria is degraded, so too is Assad's excuse for his oppression of his people. Those who revolted against his vicious and merciless rule are not terrorists - they are ordinary people fighting for their freedom. But thanks to the pusillanimous behavior of the international community, they are paying a terrible price for their rebellion.
