George Sabra currently residing in Turkey said his election showed that the SNC was not sectarian, and he appealed for more weapons to help overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, according to the BBC.

Farouq Tayfour, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected his vice president.

The SNC’s 41-member general secretariat, itself newly elected, chose Sabra, who garnered 28 votes, as part of efforts to revamp the group working to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

Earlier on Friday, the umbrella group elected 11 members to sit on its executive committee.

The executive committee members included Abdel baeset Sayda, the SNC’s former head.

The SNC is set to start talks on Saturday with other Syrian factions including representatives of rebel groups inside Syria on forming a new, wider body that hopes to gain international recognition as a transitional government, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week called the SNC unrepresentative of opposition forces on the ground.

However, the Syrian National Council, vying to keep its leading role and under US pressure to unify, on Friday called for a delay to a decision on bringing together all groups opposed to President Bashar al-Assad.

However, a major activist network, the Local Coordination Committees quit the bloc accusing SNC of being unable to adopt a “serious ad effective reform plan” .

“Several attempts have been made by the Local Coordination Committees in Syria to push the Syrian National Council and its leadership to adopt a serious and effective general reform plan so that the SNC can assume its role as a political representative of the great people of Syria,” the Local Coordination Committees said in a statement.

“Therefore, the Local Coordination Committees hereby declares its withdrawal from the Syrian National Council.”

The two-day Istanbul meeting includes almost all opposition factions, while representatives from several Arab and Western countries were present as observers, along with a representative of international Syria envoy Kofi Annan, according to Al Jazeera.

The SNC has been widely criticized for not representing the full diversity of minority groups in Syria.

Last Sunday, the SNC appointed Kurdish activist Abdel Basset Sayda as its new leader after said Burhan Ghalioun, who stepped down last month as head of the main opposition group the Syrian National Council, amid mounting criticism having his presidency constantly renewed. Ghalioun had also been accused of ignoring the Local Coordination Committees, which spearhead anti-government protests on the ground in Syria, and of giving the Muslim Brotherhood too big a role.

Kurdish leader Sayda has pledged to embrace all groups to win a broader appeal.

“Our first aim is to create reform inside the [council] and reconstruct our structure [while] continuing our relations with the other groups in the opposition,” the council’s new leader, Kurdish activist Abdel Basset Sayda, told the Hurriyet Daily News in an interview on June 15, adding that all groups that wished to join the council would be welcomed.

Friday’s only major absentee was the National Coordination Committee for Democratic Change, a large group of Arabs, Kurds and socialists, who said “technical problems” prevented them from attending, other participants said, according to Hurriyet news. 

The meeting comes ahead of a planned major conference organized by opposition groups in Cairo under the auspices of the Arab League, although no date for that meeting has yet been announced.

In Turkey where the group is meeting, the number of registered Syrian refugees has topped 30,000, a Turkish foreign ministry official said on Friday, according to Al Arabiya.

UN officials have said Syria has now entered in a full-scale civil war, with activists saying more than 14,400 people have been killed since the uprising erupted in Mid-March 2011.

“Abdel Basset Sayda has been elected president of the Syrian National Council as successor to Dr. Burhan Ghalioun,” a brief statement on SNC’s official facebook page said.

He takes over from Paris-based academic Ghalioun, an exile living in Paris, who stepped down last month over mounting criticism for having had his presidency constantly renewed when the council was supposed to represent a democratic alternative to the rule of President Bashar al-Assad, Al Jazeera reported. Burhan Ghalioun,  had been president of the council since it was formed in August of last year.

SNC’s new president Sayda is another of those exiled academics, a philosophy professor who lived outside the country for some 18 years, more than a decade in Sweden.  Born in 1956 in Amuda, a mostly Kurdish city in northeastern Syria, Sayda is an expert in ancient civilizations and author of a number of books on Syria’s Kurdish minority but is Arabic educated, according to Reuters. 

The SNC has been repeatedly condemned for not representing the full diversity of Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Alawites, Sunni Muslims and other ethnic and religious groups in Syria.

A dozen Kurdish political groups are banned by Syrian authorities.

Opposition sources said the election of Sayda could help attract more Kurds, who number one million out of Syria’s 21 million population.

Demonstrations against Assad’s rule might have taken place in Kurdish regions of Syria but not as intense as protests in the rest of the country.