"We will not engage with this terrorist in direct talks, with this terrorist in particular, and so there won't be any direct talks unless this terrorist apologizes and also shaves off his beard," Jaafari said in Arabic.

Jaafari has a neatly cropped beard of his own, but his facial hair is of a different order than that of Alloush, a devout Sunni Muslim and member of Jaish al-Islam, a powerful rebel faction. Alloush's beard is the sort of scruff that secular, authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world have ordered trimmed or fully shaved.

The two sides are not meeting each other in face-to-face discussions but rather are engaging in "proximity talks," where they sit down with interlocutors who are trying to broker a settlement to the bitter half-decade Syrian war.

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As my colleague Hugh Naylor reported from Geneva, Jaafari has stymied the talks by harping on the composition of the HNC and pointing to the supposedly dangerous Islamism of its members.

"No Syrian faction can monopolize the representation of all the opposition," he said.

Beyond the rhetoric, Jaafari and Alloush embody Syria's sharp and increasingly sectarian divide. The former is a dogged defender of Assad, who, like Jaafari, is also a member of the minority Alawite sect. He is married to an Iranian, holds a doctorate in political science from the Sorbonne University in Paris and is fluent in French, English and Persian (in addition to Arabic).

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Alloush, meanwhile, spent years studying religious jurisprudence in Saudi Arabia. He was a relative unknown and only appointed to the top negotiating post in the wake of the death of his cousin Zahran Alloush, the similarly bearded leader of Jaish al-Islam who was killed in an airstrike last December. The move was perceived by some, including figures within the fractured rebellion, as a deliberately provocative act.