By Arshad Mohammed AMMAN (Reuters) - Western governments are ready to increase support to opponents of President Bashar al-Assad if he rejects a political solution to Syria's civil war, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday. Kerry said recent military gains by Assad's forces were only temporary and that if the Syrian leader believed that the counter-offensives against the rebels would be decisive, "then he is miscalculating".

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian rebels killed at least 40 soldiers and other fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad as they captured a military base in the northwestern province of Idlib on Wednesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The anti-Assad monitoring group said the mainly Islamist rebels, including fighters from the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, seized al-Shabiba military camp near the town of Nayrab on the main road leading west from Aleppo to the Mediterranean.

Forty Syrian soldiers and pro-regime militiamen were killed in fighting with rebels who captured an army camp near the town of Nayrab in the northwestern province of Idlib on Wednesday, a watchdog reported. Rebels took control of the army camp, which was "one of the most important bastions of the regime in the Idlib region," and several army checkpoints in the area, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The UN nuclear watchdog's latest report on Iran's nuclear program marks the "unfortunate milestone" of a decade of Iranian defiance of the body, the US State Department said Wednesday. The International Atomic Energy Agency's director general issued the report Sunday, ten years after the IAEA's first on the Iranian program in June 2003. "And in the past 10 years, Iran has brazenly ignored multiple Board of Governors' resolutions while advancing its enrichment program in blatant violation of its international obligations," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said.