After months of delays, a “Geneva II” conference meant to broker an end to the Syrian civil war has been scheduled to begin on January 22 in Geneva, Switzerland, the United Nations said Monday morning.

“At long last and for the first time, the Syrian government and opposition will meet at the negotiation table rather than the battlefield,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said during a news conference.

While he called the U.N.-brokered meeting a “mission of hope” and called on both sides to cease violence and release detainees in preparation for the talks, he did not say which parties will attend — a subject that helped push back the conference for months.

While he called the U.N.-brokered meeting a “mission of hope” and called on both sides to cease violence and release detainees in preparation for the talks, he did not say which parties will attend — a subject that helped push back the conference for months.

The conference would bring representatives from Syria’s government and elements of the opposition to negotiate an end to the fighting that has wracked Syria since March 2011.

Yet the opposition is hardly a single group; it consists of numerous factions that often oppose each other.

The conference had been held up in part because many branches of the Syrian opposition said they wouldn’t attend, or wouldn’t participate without preconditions.

Geneva II is a successor to Geneva I, a June 2012 meeting in which international parties laid out a peace plan for Syria that calls for a transitional governing body. It left open the question of whether al-Assad must leave power.