U.S. aid to the Syrian opposition is set to double to $250 million, Secretary of State John Kerry said, adding that Washington would also provide new non-lethal military equipment for rebel fighters.

The announcement came after talks among the pro-opposition “Friends of Syria” group in Istanbul.

But despite the new aid package, the U.S. paid no heed to calls for arms supplies or a direct intervention.

Some of the money will be used to “provide an expanded range of support” to rebel fighters [...]

Rebels warned two Christian towns on Saturday they will be attacked if they do not evict regime forces, as the new Greek Orthodox patriarch said Syria’s often-fearful Christians will stay put and urged a peaceful end to the conflict.

Yet a key opposition group said Syria’s conflict is not a sectarian one, contradicting warnings this week by a UN team that increasing sectarianism is threatening whole communities.

In a video message to the Hama provincial towns of Mharda and Sqilbiya, one of [...]

The Syrian regime has a large arsenal of chemical weapons, which matches up to Israel’s nuclear arsenal, the defected former head of Syria’s chemical warfare program told Al Arabiya on Monday.

Major-General Adnan Sillu, who defected from the regime earlier this year, was party to top-levels talks about the use of chemical weapons on both rebel fighters and civilians.

He told Al Arabiya where the Syrian regime has stored its chemical weapons in specific cities across the war-torn country, highlighting chemical warehouses [...]

An Islamist faction of Syrian rebels captured an infantry base in the northern city of Aleppo, its fighters said Sunday, as forces fighting to topple President Bashar Assad advanced on the country’s largest city.

Also Sunday, Syrian warplanes blasted a Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus, killing eight people and wounding dozens, activists said. Some Palestinian groups in the Yarmouk camp have been backing Assad’s regime.

The base was the second major army installation taken by rebels in a week in Aleppo. Its [...]

The United States will provide weapons for the Syrian opposition fighters if that will speed up the fall of the President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford (pictured), said on the sidelines of “Friends of Syria” meeting on Wednesday.

“We are in favor for a political solution and if we see weapons provisions to Syrian rebels to be in support to such political solution then we will go for such possibility.”

“Friends of Syria” countries, a group that includes [...]

The Al Nusrah Front for the People of the Levant, an al Qaeda-linked jihadist group that is fighting Bashir al Assad’s regime in Syria, and allied jihadist groups took control of the last major Syrian Army base in western Aleppo after a two-month-long siege. The base is believed to be involved in Syria’s chemical weapons program.

The Sheikh Suleiman base, or Base 111, fell to the Al Nusrah Front and “several Islamist rebel battalions linked to it,” a representative of the [...]

Islamist rebels on Sunday seized large swathes of a Syrian military base west of Aleppo, as they consolidated their control over territory in the north near the Turkish border, AFP reported.

According to the report, Sheikh Suleiman base sprawls over nearly 500 acres of rocky hills about 15 miles from Aleppo city, an area now almost completely under rebel control.

Fighters hoisted a trademark black jihadist flag over one of the buildings they captured in the morning as firefights persisted with light [...]

Minority Christians in Syria’s largest city Aleppo said Friday, December 7; they face starvation after dozens of believers already died in targeted attacks rocking Christian areas of the war-torn country.

“Bread isn’t found since last week, there is no wheat in the city and of course fuel is not available so…bakeries are not working,” said Majd Ajji, whose father runs a Baptist church in Aleppo, where airstrikes and gun battles transformed buildings into heaps of rubble.

Witnesses saw children fighting for food.

Most [...]

The Syrian military has loaded precursor chemicals for the deadly nerve gas sarin into aerial bombs and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar al-Assad, NBC News reported Wednesday.

If confirmed, the move would mark a step further in Syria’s progression toward possibly using chemical weapons.

U.S. officials told NBC News that the loaded aerial bombs could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter jets.

But they stressed that the sarin bombs had not yet been loaded onto planes and [...]