Obama pledges non-lethal aid to Syrian rebels

While peace envoy Kofi Annan piled diplomatic pressure on the regime by seeking the backing of its ally Russia.The announcement was the most overt show of US support for the rebels to date and is certain to irritate Russia following its fierce condemnation of the Wests calls on President Bashar al-Assad to step down.Blasts meanwhile once again rocked Syrias flashpoint city of Homs as the regime pressed on with its assault on protest hubs while the rebels countered by attacking a military base in Damascus province.Obama said at talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of a nuclear security summit in Seoul that they agreed there should be a process of transition to a legitimate government in Syria.A top US national security official said the delivery of medical aid and other urgent supplies would top the agenda of a Friends of Syria meeting scheduled for April 1 in Istanbul.Russia denounced the US-backed group on Friday amid contradictory signals from Moscow about the extent of its divide with the West over the crisis.Annans meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev comes just days after Moscow followed through on unprecedented criticism of Assad by finally backing a UN Security Council call on his forces to pull out of protest cities.Assad has thus far shown few signs of complying. At least 28 civilians were reported killed on Saturday and monitors reported new fighting stretching from the outskirts of the capital Damascus to Syrias northern border with Turkey.Sunday witnessed heavy shelling of Khaldiyeh, Hamidiyeh and Old Homs neighbourhoods by the regimes army, and explosions shook the whole city, said the Local Coordination Committees (LCC) of Syria.Opposition fighters responded to their heavy recent losses by setting up a council to unify their ranks. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the rebels fired rocket-propelled grenades at a military facility near Damascus on Sunday.