The United States plans to start supplying arms directly to Syrian rebels within a month, American officials said yesterday, as it emerged that the CIA has begun shipping weapons to a secret network of warehouses in neighbouring Jordan.

It's unlikely belated Western military aid will help moderate rebels attend peace talks as equals, Instead, Washington should orchestrate an accommodation.

Syrian state media had announced that "Operation Northern Storm" would retake Aleppo "within days" after regime forces captured Qusair at the beginning of June.

Regime change would geographically isolate Hizbollah from critical Iranian support, significantly weakening Iran's influence in the region, writes Chris Mahony.

More than half a million people fled Syria's civil war last year, and the UN says that number could double by the end of 2013.

Two years ago, at the beginning of the violence in Syria, I was asked to write a blog in the British Medical Journal on behalf of Medecins Sans Frontieres.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has made an attempt to bounce Russia into supporting a future for Syria without President Bashar al-Assad.

Photographs of the bloodied face of a 14-year-old boy executed in front of his parents by jihadists in northern Syria show the extreme justice meted out in rebel-held areas.

Al-Qaeda's high command staked its interest in the outcome of Syria's civil war yesterday as its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called on jihadist fighters to build an anti-Western state after toppling President Bashar al-Assad.

Sometimes, in diplomacy, a translator is not enough. You need a code-breaker.

It's a long way from Tauranga - but Janna Hamilton is hoping those back home will listen to the stories she tells about the suffering of the Syrian people.

Syrian soldiers have killed three Westerners, including an American woman and a British man, both Muslims, in northwest Idlib province near the Turkish border, a monitoring group says.

The waiters passed between tables carrying silver platters piled with meat, fruits and elaborate desserts.

Israel launched an airstrike into Syria, apparently targeting a suspected weapons site, US officials said.

President Barack Obama said he doesn't foresee any circumstance requiring the US to send ground troops into Syria, even as Washington pursues more evidence about the regime's purported use of chemical weapons.

The bodies of the Syrian boys and young men in jeans and casual shirts were strewn along a blood-stained pavement, dying apparently where they fell. Weeping women moved among the dead, and one of them screamed, "Where are you, people of the village?"

The United States is reconsidering its opposition to arming Syrian rebel groups, US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said yesterday, as reports emerged of a fresh massacre of up to 50 women and children by government forces in Syria.

Syrian rebels have captured a military base in the south and set their sights on seizing control of a strategically important region along the border with Jordan that would give them a critical gateway to attempt an attack on the capital, Damascus.

A Chinese New Zealander who went to Syria to join rebel fighters has been reunited with his wife in the US.

Anxious to keep Syria's civil war from spiralling into even worse problems, President Barack Obama said yesterday he worried about the country becoming a haven for extremists when - not if - President Bashar Assad was ousted from power.