BEIRUT (AP) — Syria's main opposition bloc on Friday urged the international community to take action to protect civilians in the cities of Homs and Daraa that have been targeted by military as part of a government campaign to regain control of the territory it lost to the opposition.

The appeal comes as opposition figures meet in Turkey to elect a new leadership, including an interim government that would try to run rebel-held territories in Syria.

The Syrian National Coalition appealed to the United Nations and Western countries that have supported the opposition in Syria's civil war "to intervene immediately" and provide food and medicine to the besieged, rebel-held areas of the central city of Homs and Daraa in the south, where the uprising against President Bashar Assad's rule began in March 2011.

More than 93,000 people have been killed in the conflict that began as peaceful protests but turned into an armed revolt after opposition supporters took up arms to fight a brutal government crackdown.

The government controls much of Homs, Syria's third largest city, while several neighborhoods in the center are opposition strongholds. Building on its capture of the strategic town of Qusair between the Lebanese border and Homs, the army launched an offensive in the city on Saturday, pounding rebel positions with artillery and airstrikes for five straight days, according to the SNC.

In a statement, the SNC said clashes between rebels and troops flared up again in Friday morning, along with shelling of residential areas of Sheik Miskeen and Jassim in Daraa.

"The areas under attack in Homs have been cut off from the rest of the world and suffer from an urgent shortage of medicine and food," the SNC said, appealing to its Western backers to support rebel units and provide them with more sophisticated weapons.

In Damascus, Syria's state-run SANA news agency said that three people were injured in an overnight mortar attack in the capital's Dweilaa region.

In recent months, rebels fighting in the north have received more powerful weaponry, including anti-tank missiles and surface-to-air missiles, likely supplied by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The U.S., which has provided opposition fighters with non-lethal aid, said recently it was willing to supply them with arms, but has been reluctant to do so for fear they could end up in the hands of radical Islamic groups that have been the most effective fighting force on the opposition's side.

The Western-backed opposition coalition is primarily composed of exiled politicians with little apparent support from Syrians inside the country, who are trying to survive the third summer of devastating conflict.

SNC acting leader George Sabra and senior opposition figures Louay Safi and Mustafa Sabbagh top the list of candidates for the new leadership that is expected to emerge from the coalition's two-day meeting in Istanbul. However, its members remain deeply divided and previous attempts to unite its ranks and devise a strategy for possible peace talks that the U.S. and Russia have been trying to convene in Geneva this summer have failed.

In Rome, United Nation's food agencies said that Syria's food security situation has significantly deteriorated over the past year, leaving at least 4 million Syrians unable to produce or buy food to survive.

With fighting well in its third year, "crop and livestock production, food availability and access to food have all taken an increasingly heavy toll," according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP). Their experts visited Syria in May and June.

Current wheat production is 2.4 million tons, some 40 percent less than the annual average harvest of more than 4 million tons before the crisis and 15 percent lower than the reduced harvest of 2011/2012.

"There is a limited window of opportunity to ensure crisis-affected families do not lose vital sources of food and income," the two U.N. organizations said, and Syria needs to import about 1.5 million tons of wheat for the current season.

The livestock sector "has been seriously depleted by the conflict," the report said, saying that poultry production is down over 50 percent compared with 2011, while sheep and cattle numbers have also significantly declined."

Household food insecurity has increased with massive population displacement in Syria, disruption of agricultural production, unemployment, economic sanctions, currency depreciation and high food and fuel prices, the report said.

___

Associated Press writer Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

By Catherine Hornby

ROME (Reuters) - Four million Syrians, a fifth of the population, are unable to produce or buy enough food, and farmers are short of the seed and fertilizers they need to plant their next crop, the United Nations said on Friday.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said Syria's domestic wheat production over the next 12 months is likely to be severely compromised and that it will need to import 1.5 million metric tons of wheat for the 2013/14 season.

"There is a limited window of opportunity to ensure crisis-affected families do not lose vital sources of food and income," the two agencies said.

After more than two years of civil war that has killed more than 90,000 people, food shortages have escalated due to massive population displacement, disruption of agricultural production, unemployment, economic sanctions and high food and fuel prices.

FAO has launched an appeal for $41.7 million to assist 768,000 people and has so far received $3.3 million.

The two agencies said the funding must be secured by August to provide farmers with fertilizers and seeds to plant in October. Otherwise, the report said, many farmers will be unable to harvest wheat until mid-2015.

Syria's livestock sector has also been seriously depleted by the conflict, with poultry production down by more than 50 percent compared with 2011 and significant declines in numbers of sheep and cattle, the report found.

The agencies said domestic wheat output was seen at about 2.4 million metric tons in 2012/13, some 40 percent less than the average annual harvest of more than 4 million metric tons before the conflict.

WFP said last month that Syrian families were increasingly resorting to begging for food to cope with shortages and high prices.

The average monthly price of wheat flour has more than doubled between May 2011 and May 2013 in several areas, and there are serious bread shortages across the country.

Food production has been hampered by high costs, damage to machinery and storage facilities and by the fact that many farmers have fled their land for fear of violence, the report found.

Meanwhile, the conflict appeared likely to continue into a third year as the fractious opposition, trying to hold on to swathes of territory across Syria, struggled to unite.

FAO and WFP also warned of a serious risk that livestock diseases could be transmitted to neighboring countries and said farmers needed vaccines to prevent this from happening.

A Syrian state buyer earlier this week issued a tender to buy 200,000 metric tons of flour on the international market and planned to pay with funds from bank accounts frozen by trade sanctions.

Food is excluded from U.S. and European trade sanctions imposed on President Bashar al-Assad's government.

(Reporting By Catherine Hornby; editing by Veronica Brown and Jane Baird)

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A suicide bomber sneaked into a police dining hall in central Afghanistan at lunchtime Friday and blew himself up, killing 12, while a border police officer and a civilian were killed in a separate suicide attack in the south, authorities said.

Investigators are still trying to determine how the suicide bomber passed two checkpoints to enter the crowded hall at about 12:30 p.m., said Uruzgan provincial police spokesman Fared Ayil. He said authorities had not ruled out that the attacker may have been a police officer himself or wearing a police uniform.

The bomber entered the dining hall and detonated a suicide vest just inside the door, he said. The dining hall was on a base in Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan's capital, used by police assigned to secure the main highway to neighboring Kandahar.

Afghan media reported 10 of the 12 victims were Afghan national police officers. Uruzgan provincial government spokesman Abdullah Himmat, however, would only say that the dead were "primarily police." Five other people were wounded in the explosion.

Part of the problem identifying the victims is that three or four bodies were so badly torn up by the blast that authorities could not immediately determine if they were police or civilians, Ayil said. Relatives of police officers had been present in the dining hall at the time of the attack, he said.

This year has seen violence levels comparable to the worst in nearly 12 years of war in Afghanistan. Though the Taliban have recently indicated they would be open to beginning peace talks, they have also said they will not give up their attacks.

In an email statement sent out Friday, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid vowed to continue jihad, or holy war, through the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins next week.

"Ramadan is a holy month and jihad is a holy cause," he said. "The mujahedeen will continue their tactics and attacks against the enemy."

In the southern province of Kandahar, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a border checkpoint entering Afghanistan from Pakistan, killing at least two people and wounding eight others.

Kandahar provincial government spokesman Javeed Faisal said the attacker detonated his explosives at midmorning at the gates of the Spin Boldak crossing into Afghanistan, which is used by thousands of people every day.

In addition to the suicide bomber, the blast killed one border police officer and wounded one, and killed one civilian and wounded seven others.

Border police say the officer killed was the checkpoint commander, and they assume he was the target.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Such attacks are usually the work of Islamic militants.

In another incident on Friday in Uruzgan, Himmat, the government spokesman, said a boy and a girl were killed by a roadside bomb on their way home around midday.

_____

Amir Shah contributed to this story; Khan reported from Kandahar, Afghanistan