As the 20 July deadline for the renewal of the mandate of the UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) approaches, there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity as the various parties involved try to work out what role the international community and/or the UN should or should not play in the continuing crisis. On 6 July UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon admitted in a report to the Security Council that UN/Arab League mediator Kofi Annan's six-point peace plan "has not been implemented in any meaningful way" and that "as of now, the government of Syria and the armed opposition both appear to have chosen to pursue a military response to the current conflict."

That being the case, Mr Ban recommended that UNSMIS, which suspended its monitoring activities on 16 June, should instead focus on securing a political solution to the conflict. "If UNSMIS were reoriented in this manner," he said, "the Mission would redeploy from the field to the capital to minimize risks, retaining core civilian and military observer capacities to focus on the spectrum of initiatives feeding into the political process."

Mr Annan himself visited Damascus on 9 July, where he described his talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Asad as "positive and constructive" and said that "we agreed an approach which I will share with the opposition." He then flew to Tehran, where he told a press conference on 10 July that Mr Asad had "made a suggestion of building an approach from the ground up in some of the districts where we have extreme violence – to try and contain the violence in those districts and, step by step, build up and end the violence across the country." Mr Annan also emphasized that "Iran has a role to play and my presence here explains that I believe in that," which did not go down at all well in Washington, where White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that "I don't think anybody with a straight face could argue that Iran has had a positive impact on developments in Syria."

Mr Annan went on to Baghdad for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, after which he told reporters in Geneva on 11 July that "in both Iran and Iraq the governments committed to supporting the six-point plan. They supported the idea of political transition, which will be Syrian-led, and allow the Syrians to decide what their future political dispensation would be."