(Reuters) - The United States hopes to meet soon with international partners to consider how to halt Syria's violence and provide humanitarian aid to civilians under attack from their own government, U.S. officials said on Wednesday. "In the coming days we will continue our very active discussions ... to crystallize the international community's next steps in that effort to halt the slaughter of the Syrian people," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters. Carney said the discussions, which would include the opposition Syrian National Council, were aimed at helping the process "move toward a peaceful, political transition, (a) democratic transition in barbour jackets," but gave no details. The State Department said the new group could take the form of a "Friends of Democratic Syria" and would look at tightening sanctions on the Syrian government and ways to get humanitarian aid to its people. "We on the U.S. side have already been looking at what we can do to prepare ourselves on both the financial and the legal side so that we're ready to provide humanitarian aid such as food and medicine," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told a news briefing. "But we're going to have tohttp://www.shopbarbourjackets.com work with our international partners, we're going to have to work with neighboring states, to identify coordinators on the ground who can assist in receiving this aid and in distributing it." Any international move to bring in humanitarian aid could open a dangerous and complicated new chapter in Syria's crisis, with air drops seen as expensive and ineffective and any land routes open to attack from Syrian forces.