Syrian opposition meets Arab League Secretary in Cairo

              
Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby met with Ahmed el-Jerba, the head of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), in Cairo on Saturday ahead of peace talks expected to take place later this month in Geneva.           

Arab League foreign ministers are set to meet to discuss the situation in Syria on Sunday.             
The deeply fractured Syrian opposition is under pressure to overcome differences and agree to peace talks with President Bashar Assad's government, with international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warning on Friday that negotiations cannot go forward without them.              

The opposition factions are split on whether to attend the talks.         

They also disagree over conditions for taking part - from demands that Assad steps down right away to guarantees that he would not be part of a negotiated solution for the country's future.           

The opposition is also split between Damascus-based groups, who have said they will attend without preconditions, and the exiled opposition, the majority of whom are part of the Syrian National Coalition umbrella group, which is more hard-line.           

The government has rejected demands that Assad step aside, saying he will stay at least until the end of his term in mid-2014, and will then decide whether to seek re-election.            

Assad also has said he will not negotiate with armed rebels.           

More than 120,000 people have been killed so far in the war, now in its third year, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based watchdog that closely monitors the war through a network of activists in the country.         

The U.N. said in July that 100,000 Syrians have been killed, but has not updated that figure since.            

Millions of Syrians have fled their homes because of the fighting putting a huge refugee burden on the surrounding nations.                 

On the field:          

Syria's air force hit the town of Sbeineh south of Damascus on Saturday, as loyalists aimed at crushing rebel bastions around the capital, a monitoring group said.
         
"Warplanes struck areas of Sbeineh... as Syrian regime troops shelled the town," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.             

Rebels on the capital's southern front were fighting regime troops backed by fighters from Lebanon's Hezbollah and pro-regime militias.               

In turn, Syrian Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP  that "the strike was part of the regime's offensive against rebel areas in and around southern Damascus."           


AP/LBCI