Hillary Clinton Live Blog

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged members of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government on Sunday to halt operations targeting civilians, or face "serious consequences".

  
"Our message must be clear to those who give the orders and those who carry them out: Stop killing your fellow citizens or you will face serious consequences," Clinton said in prepared remarks at a conference on the Syrian conflict in Istanbul.

 
Clinton said the United States was providing communications equipment to Syria's civilian opposition. She added that despite accepting a new peace plan proposed by UN-Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan, Assad's government appeared to have broken its promises.

Representatives from 70 European, Arab and other countries are meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, on Sunday to look at ways of supporting the Syrian opposition and applying further international pressure on the Assad regime to end a deadly crackdown on protests.

Calling for tighter sanctions and for ways to hold Syrian leaders to account for abuses, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Saturday that the US focus in Istanbul will be to "intensify" the array of US, European, Canadian, Arab and Turkish sanctions on Syria.

She said to look at sending more humanitarian aid to the needy, despite Syrian efforts to block it.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, will arrive in Saudi Arabia on Friday for talks to weigh limited options available to end the violence in Syria and launch a "strategic forum" with Gulf allies against a backdrop of growing tensions with Iran.

The world's main superpower and its top oil exporter have been strategic allies since the 1940s, but deep disagreements over how to tackle the Arab popular uprisings last year strained the relationship.

Although the two states have mended that rift, differences persist over both regional issues and energy policy, amid US concerns that Saudi Arabia might cut oil output if consumer countries release emergency reserves, neutralising their effort to bring down oil prices that have soared in recent months.

Topping the agenda at the talks involving Clinton, King Abdullah, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal and other senior Gulf diplomats will be the situation in Syria, which Riyadh sees as a key to the future of the Middle East.

US Secretary of State Clinton says she will be pushing Syrian opposition very hard between now and the Istanbul conference on Syria this weekend to present what she termed an inclusive vision, Reuters reports.