Mokhtar Lamani was the head of the office of the UN-Arab League Joint Special Representative in Damascus until last March. As such, he was in daily contact with both the opposition and the regime.

Lamani quit after the failure of the Geneva II peace talks. According to him, one of the main reasons for that failure was that the West over-estimated the Syrian National Coalition’s influence. He says he witnessed the fact that the Coalition did not have a "big impact" on the armed groups. He adds: "I think that was a mistake when they declared the coalition not only as the only representative of the Syrian opposition, but the representative of the Syrian people”.
Indeed, the internal opposition is deeply divided and each group has its own agenda. "It’s so fragmented. We were trying to have a database with the armed groups, what they called "brigades" and of course "brigade" has no military definition, it can be five people, as well as 30,000 people. We counted at that time more than 2,000 different brigades", he explains.
On the rise of the Islamic State organisation, he admits he was taken by surprise, like many observers. "No Syrian on Earth expected the crisis to be that long", he says.

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