DOHA (Reuters) - Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday Washington was increasingly confident that weapons being sent by others to the Syrian opposition were going to moderate forces within it rather than to extremists.
Kerry, on his first overseas tour since his appointment, said at a news conference in Doha that he had had talks in Qatar and during an earlier stop in Saudi Arabia about which kinds of arms were being sent to which Syrian opposition forces.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are widely believed to be providing weapons to the rebels, but the United States says it does not wish to send arms for fear they may find their way to Islamist hardliners who might then use them against Western targets.
"We had a discussion about the types of weapons that are being transferred," Kerry said.
Referring to the supply of weapons, he said, "We did discuss the question of the ability to try to guarantee that it's going to the right people and to the moderate Syrian opposition coalition and I think it's really in the last months that that has developed as a capacity that we have greater confidence in."
Some 70,000 people have been killed in Syria and nearly a million have fled the country in a two-year uprising, the United Nations says.
The conflict began two years ago as peaceful protests that turned violent when President Bashar al-Assad tried to crush the revolt.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar share the West's alarm at the rise of al Qaeda-aligned groups in Syria, and say the answer is for outsiders such as them to be more involved in backing rebels there.
The two Gulf Arab states have argued that building ties through aid to favored opposition groups is the only way to ensure that other, hardline Islamist factions are sidelined.
(Writing by Sami Aboudi and William Maclean; Editing by Louise Ireland)
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