WASHINGTON  - The US Central Intelligence Agency has been feeding information to select rebel fighters in Syria to try to make them more effective against government troops, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.Citing unnamed current and former US officials, the newspaper said the new CIA effort reflected a change in the administration’s approach that aims to strengthen secular rebel fighters. The CIA has sent officers to Turkey to help vet rebels who receive arms shipments from Gulf allies, the report said. But administration officials cited concerns about some weapons going to rebels, the paper noted.In Iraq, the CIA has been directed by the White House to work with elite counterterrorism units to help the Iraqis counter the flow of al Qaeda-linked fighters across the border with Syria, The Journal said. According to the report, the West favors fighters aligned with the Free Syrian Army, which supports the Syrian Opposition Coalition political group. Syrian opposition commanders said the CIA had been working with British, French and Jordanian intelligence services to train rebels in the use of various kinds of weapons, the paper said.The move comes as the al Nusra Front, the main al Qaeda-linked group operating in Syria, is deepening its ties to the terrorist organization’s central leadership in Pakistan, The Journal said. The new aid to rebels doesn’t change the US decision against taking direct military action, the paper noted. Rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad on Saturday seized a key air base in the southern Syrian province of Daraa after two weeks of fierce battles with loyalist troops, a watchdog said. Meanwhile, in Damascus’s ancient Umayyad mosque, thousands of Assad supporters attended the funeral of pro-regime Sunni cleric Mohamed Saeed al-Bouti and his grandson, who died in a Thursday suicide bombing that killed some 50 people.“Opposition fighters loyal to Al-Nusra Front, Al-Yarmuk Brigade and other rebel groups seized air defence Base 38 near the town of Saida, on the road linking Damascus to Amman, in the province of Daraa,” said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The seizure came “after 16 days of fighting,” said the Britain-based group.At least seven rebels were killed in their final assault on the base, said the Observatory, which also documented the deaths of at least eight regime troops including an officer. “Dozens of prisoners were freed from the base’s headquarters,” it said.In the central city of Homs, troops pressed a relentless campaign against rebel enclaves after more than nine months of a suffocating siege by the army and security forces. At Bouti’s funeral in Damascus, Syria’s top Sunni authority Mufti Ahmad Badreddine Hassoun called on “the Islamic and Arab world to save Syria, which is facing a global war. “If Syria falls today you will be next,” he said before thousands of mourners.The ceremony was led by Toufiq Bouti, the dead sheikh’s son, and representatives of key Damascus allies Iran and Hezbollah also attended. The United Nations estimates that violence across Syria has killed at least 70,000 people since the conflict erupted in March 2011.On Saturday alone, at least 63 people were killed in violence across Syria, according to the Observatory, which added that at least 23 of them were civilians.