Brahimi said, “The matter is not very pleasant for me. I’m very sad to leave the job and to leave Syria in such a bad state. ... All those in charge or who can influence the situation have to remember that the question is: How many people must die? How much destruction must happen before Syria returns to being the Syria that we knew?” He said that he resigned before submitting his report to the Security Council yesterday. He spoke about the efforts that led to the failure in Geneva I and Geneva II and about the lack of hope of going to a third negotiating round.

At the UN headquarters, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, with Brahimi standing at his side, said that he “accepted Brahimi’s resignation but he will continue to work there until the end of May,” to give the UN time to find a successor for the job.

Brahimi abandoned the sinking ship of UN-Arab League mediation, which he accepted only reluctantly. He tried to leave more than once and to stay on as only an international mediator, but the UN Secretariat rejected his request because it wanted to maintain the UN-Arab League umbrella on an Arab conflict.

A year and a half after succeeding Kofi Annan in August 2012, the UN envoy to Syria Brahimi stopped his diplomatic travels, in effect conceding that achieving a political settlement based on the Geneva declaration was impossible in light of both sides of the Syrian conflict betting on one undeclared solution: a military victory.

There is an international diplomatic vacuum on Syria. The UN and Arab League mediation has not only failed, but it disappeared following the resignations of its pillars, one after the other. All the positions in charge of moving it forward are vacant, from Nasser al-Kidwa, Mokhtar Lamani and even Lakhdar Brahimi .

A Western diplomat said that this time the UN has decided to accept Brahimi’s resignation, and not reject it as it did on previous occasions, when he used to threaten to resign to improve his work conditions or to pressure the Russians and the Americans to activate the negotiations on Geneva and bring the parties to the conflict to the negotiating table. It seems that his repeated threats to resign and the conviction that the mediation process in Syria and the Geneva process are frozen have made the UN secretariat accept Brahimi’s resignation, which no one asked him to retract.

With the resignation of the veteran Algerian diplomat, who made his decision to resign only reluctantly, the pillars of the international mission to mediate in the Syrian war have all collapsed because Brahimi’s assistant Nasser al-Qidwa resigned late last year.

The third and principal element in the international mediation effort was the Moroccan-Canadian diplomat Mokhtar Lamani, who resigned as head of the UN Office in Damascus and as Brahimi’s representative there. The UN has not yet found a replacement. The British candidate to succeed him, Martin Griffith, has been waiting for two months for the Syrian authorities’ approval to succeed Lamani at the UN office in Damascus.

It is likely that last month’s UN request that Brahimi postpone his resignation until a successor is found didn’t bear fruit. Caretaker mediator Brahimi will remain at his post until the end of May. Until then, the UN will find it very difficult to find a suitable alternative. Appointing a new mediator requires obtaining the consent of all parties. And the names being considered are mere media suggestions, according to an Arab diplomatic source in New York.

Appointing an alternative requires Russian-American understandings whose conditions are not present now, not only because of the aggravation of the dispute over Ukraine, but also because, after the developments on the ground in Syria, it’s difficult to make any breakthroughs in the political process in Syria or revive Geneva. If that were not the case, Brahimi would not have resigned.

A Syrian official said that Syria has not been consulted about any of the names in circulation and that those names are only circulating through the media. This means that Brahimi’s resignation was only taken seriously in the last few days. Some say that Brahimi’s successor will be Kamal Morjane, Tunisia’s foreign and defense minister and UN envoy under former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

A diplomatic source in Paris said that the UN has been notified that Morocco and Tunisia want none of their diplomats to take over the mediation post in the Syrian crisis. Morjane was the only candidate who requested that post through his contacts with the UN. Damascus would likely not agree to his appointment because he is close to the US, lacks independence and because he may be seeking the position to revive his stature in the Tunisian political scene, according to the source.

The diplomatic source said that Javier Solana has not been formally proposed and that he didn’t ask to be appointed to the post. A Syrian official thinks that Damascus is unlikely to accept Solana, NATO’s former secretary-general, as Brahimi’s successor. Although former Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos is viewed positively in Damascus, that he represents the EU — which is involved in the attack on Syria — doesn’t make him an acceptable consensus candidate.