There was quite a bit of ground made on the issue of solving the Syrian crisis across the weekend. The UN security council has finally agreed on a resolution.

No small feat given that Russia supports Al-Assad and his regime, and the other permanent members on the council don't see a future for him in Syria.

They way they got around it? They left the issue of Al-Assad and his future out of the equation.

There will be an election within 18 months. The UN will oversee it and somehow every refugee who's fled Ayria will be allowed to vote. There will presumably be polling booths all over Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, parts of Iraq and then throughout Europe too. Can you imagine the logistics of trying to organise that election?

There will be talks in January. It's not clear whether Assad will show up to those, but he has to. It will come down to his allies, Moscow and Tehran, to insist on that.

More than 275,000 people are dead. 13.5 million people need humanitarian aid right now just to sustain life. That includes 6.5 million children.

Assad cannot, in my opinion, choose not to attend those talks.

There is a push for a ceasefire too as early as next month. That would be monitored, in time presumably, by UN peacekeepers.

That will be an extraordinarily dangerous and hazardous environment for any peace-keeping force to be involved in, and it will be an extremely difficult decision for any country to put their defence force into that role.

The Syrian regime and various other groups may agree to a ceasefire, but Isis isn't involved in these talks. Isis isn't a party to any ceasefire. Just how that will be monitored - from the ground or from afar - is anyone's guess.

But the prospect of a truce, even if it is short-term, is to be welcomed.

At the moment, the Syrian regime and the Russians are bombing areas where there are large civilian populations. The footage and the images coming through on the web are truly horrific. Again, it's children caught in the middle of all of this.

It's a resolution that should have been in place a long time ago. That it wasn't, is a major failing of the security council.

The syrian race and their once grand country have been battered enough.

The task now for the security council is to turn this peace plan from a document on a desk in New York, into a reality on the streets of Damascus.