UN Envoy on Syria Lakhdar Brahimi resigned

UN Envoy on Syria Lakhdar Brahimi on 13 May 2014 submitted his resignation to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York. He will relinquish the office on 31 May 2014.

He was also the League of Arab States Special Representative on the Syrian crisis.

He was appointed as the peace-facilitator in Syria on 17 August 2012 to replace the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

He was also a long-time Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General and was the Head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) from October 2001 to December 2004.

The resignation of the 80-year old Brahimi, who hails from Algeria, has left a vacuum in the peaceful resolution to the three-year conflict in Syria.

Syrian Crisis
The Syrian conflict that began in March 2011 has so far led to 150000 deaths. The number of deaths in the Syrian conflict has been described by UN aid agencies as the worst humanitarian crisis since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. As per an estimate, the crisis in Syria has displaced 6.5 million peoples inside Syria and 3 million peoples have become refuges outside Syria.

Under Brahimi tactful diplomacy, the Geneva Conference on Syria got underway resulting into Geneva Communique in 2012. The Communique was the first international conference on the conflict, which called for a transitional government to lead to free and fair elections.

However, the first two rounds of talks, first in January 2014 and second in February 2014 yielded only modest results in the form of cooperation on a humanitarian issue related to aid access in the long-besieged Old City of Homs.