Syria rebels gain big as Kerry tells Assad to go

Rebels in northern Syria have seized most of a military base, their third major battlefield success in as many days, as US Secretary of State John Kerry called on President Bashar al-Assad to step down.
Kerry said Assad needed to abandon hopes of riding out the war and instead accept the "inevitability" of his departure, hours after a monitoring group reported rebels were almost in complete control of the base in Aleppo province.
In Moscow, a top Russian diplomat said Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem and Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, the head of the opposition umbrella National Coalition, would make separate visits for talks in the coming weeks.
In Syria, at least another 145 people were killed across the country Wednesday, including 66 civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Separately, an opposition monitoring group said, at least 100 Syrian soldiers and 30 rebels from the al-Qaeda affiliated group al-Nusra Front were killed in three days of fighting in a town near the Iraqi border taken by insurgents yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Iranian authorities yesterday said assailants shot dead an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander in Syria while he was travelling by road from Damascus towards the Lebanese capital.
Iran's elite fighting force named the slain man as commander Hassan Shateri, in an statement on its website that said he was killed while travelling from Damascus to Beirut.
He was in charge of the Iranian Committee for the Reconstruction of Lebanon set up after the devastating war in 2006 between Israel and Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah militia, which is supported by Iran.