U.S. vows $45 million in aid to Syrian rebels

NEW YORK — The Obama administration moved Friday to rally Syria’s opposition with pledges of $45 million in new nonlethal and humanitarian assistance as the administration and other world leaders lamented the failure of diplomatic efforts to push Syrian President Bashar Assad from power.

Meanwhile, rebels pressed their broadest assault yet to drive Assad’s forces out of Syria’s largest city, activists said, with fierce fighting breaking out in an Aleppo neighborhood that is home to Kurds, an ethnic minority that has mostly stayed out of the civil war.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said intelligence suggests Assad has moved some of Syria’s chemical weapons to better secure them. Panetta said the main sites are believed to be secure, though his comments indicated that there are lingering questions about what happened to some of the weapons.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. would contribute an additional $15 million in nonlethal gear - mostly communications equipment - to the civilian opposition trying to oust Assad as well as $30 million in new humanitarian assistance to help those affected by the continuing violence.

She also delivered a new warning to Iran that it must stop arming and supporting the Assad regime.

“It is no secret that our attempts to move forward at the U.N. Security Council have been blocked repeatedly, but the United States is not waiting,” Clinton said as she announced the new aid at a gathering of the Friends of Syria group that she hosted at a New York hotel on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. She and other foreign ministers from the group met with nine Syrian opposition figures, including several who traveled from Syria to attend Friday’s session, to discuss strategy.

With U.N. action blocked by Russia and China, Clinton said the rest of the world must support the Syrian opposition. She also said it was urgent that the fractured foes of the regime unite around plans for a political transition that could put an end to more than four decades of Assad family rule.

Activists say the current 18-month conflict has led to more than 30,000 deaths.

“Conditions in Syria continue to deteriorate as the Assad regime relentlessly wages war on its own people,” Clinton said.

“We see more bodies filling hospitals and morgues and we see more refugees fleeing their homeland and flooding into neighboring countries. The regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end so that the suffering of the Syrian people can stop and a new dawn can begin.”

The new U.S. humanitarian assistance - which brings America’s total humanitarian contribution to more than $130 million since the crisis began - will include food, water, blankets and medical services to victims of the violence. U.S. officials said Thursday that an earlier shipment of medical goods provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development had just arrived in southern Syria. The officials would not provide details of how the aid made it into Syrian territory.

The additional nonlethal support brings the total U.S. contribution in that area to nearly $40 million since the crisis began and includes 1,100 sets of communications equipment, including satellite-linked computers, telephones and cameras and training for more than 1,000activists, students and independent journalists.

The U.S. is not providing military aid to the rebels although it acknowledges that other countries are.

At Friday’s meeting, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari proposed a two-stage plan to bring both sides of the Syrian conflict together to discuss a political transition.

The first stage would be to bring together the countries that endorsed a blueprint leading to a political transition that was adopted in Geneva on June 30 to now focus on implementing its planks, Zebari said.

The second stage would be to invite representatives of the government and the opposition, both inside and outside Syria, to a conference in a neutral country outside the Middle East.

He said that international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi would have to carry the plan forward.

Despite some battleground success, there have been complaints that the opposition is hopelessly splintered and unable to coalesce around the Geneva plan. Friday’s meeting was intended in part to encourage better cooperation among Assad’s foes.

“It is encouraging to see some progress toward greater opposition unity, but we all know there is more work to be done,” Clinton said. U.S. officials have noted that revolutionary councils in cities including Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, Idlib and Deir al-Zour were becoming increasingly organized.

Members of local groups from across Syria and representatives of the exile group, the Syrian National Council - including its head, Abdulbaset Sieda - attended the meeting. But U.S. officials declined to name others taking part or let them be photographed, saying that doing so would risk putting those opponents of Assad in danger of reprisals.

The meeting was led by the Arab League. Neither Russia nor China were invited.

Diplomacy has been largely sidelined in the 18-month-old Syria conflict because a key tool - U.N. Security Council action - has been neutralized by vetoes from Assad allies Russia and China.

The Russian foreign minister lashed out Friday at countries that are backing opposition groups fighting the Assad regime, saying that was “pushing Syria even deeper into internecine strife.”

Sergey Lavrov, the top Russian diplomat, told the U.N. General Assembly that the fighting in Syria must end through a comprehensive cease-fire, release of prisoners and humanitarian aid. He said Russia backs the efforts of Brahimi to end the fighting. He said the number of war crimes is growing both by the Assad regime and the opposition fighters.

The military battle for control of Syria also has been locked in a stalemate, most visibly in Aleppo, a northern city of 3 million. Since a rebel offensive on Aleppo two months ago, each side has controlled about half of the city and has repeatedly tried - but failed - to capture the rest.

Late Thursday, rebels forces launched what they said would be a “decisive battle” that by Friday had spread to wide swaths of the city. “The city is witnessing one of the most violent days. All fronts are on fire,” Aleppo-based activist Baraa al-Halabi said.

Heavy clashes were reported Friday, with regime troops firing tank and mortar shells, and rebels using heavy machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, said Aleppo activist Mohammed Saeed.

The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency confirmed battles in a number of Aleppo districts, reporting that dozens of rebels were killed. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group, put the day’s death toll in the city at 23.

For the first time, rebel fighters entered one of Aleppo’s Kurdish areas, amid conflicting reports about whether some of the local residents fought alongside regime troops or stayed out of the battle.

Since the outbreak of the uprising against Assad in March 2011, Kurds have been split in their loyalties, some siding with the regime while others joined opposition protests.

In Geneva, the U.N.’s top human-rights body stepped up efforts to gather evidence against members of Assad’s regime. The Human Rights Council appointed a renowned U.N. war-crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, to its independent panel probing purported war crimes in Syria. Such evidence could be used in a future war crimes tribunal hearing - although none is planned so far.

The council also extended the panel’s mission, due to expire by the end of September, by another six months. Last week, the investigators submitted a confidential second list of suspected war-crimes perpetrators to the U.N. human rights office.

There has also been concern that a desperate Assad could unleash chemical weapons on his opponents. It is widely believed that Syria possesses extensive chemical and biological weapons stockpiles, and it has threatened to use them if the country comes under attack.

Panetta said Friday that there have been multiple “limited” movements of chemical weapons but that Syrian officials were relocating the stocks to better secure them.

Asked whether some of the weapons have fallen into the hands of the rebels or Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Panetta said he has no “firm information to confirm that that’s taken place.”

He said the U.S. has monitored the main sites and determined they are still secure.

President Barack Obama has said the threat of chemical or biological warfare in Syria is a “red line” for the U.S., and has warned that Washington will not allow the weapons to fall into the wrong hands. He said there would be enormous consequences if the U.S. sees any movement or use of the weapons.

Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Lee, Lolita C. Baldor, Karin Laub, David Stringer, Edith M. Lederer and John Daniszewski of The Associated Press.