BEIRUT - Syrian troops pushed Wednesday into a strategic town along the highway leading to the Jordanian border as a massive Internet outage engulfed most of the country for a second day.
The regime's advance into Khirbet Ghazaleh, a town south of Damascus along a key artery to the border, came after weeks of fighting and government attempts to secure the highway.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the push was part of a wider offensive against rebels in which President Bashar Assad's troops have regained some areas around Damascus, in the central province of Homs near the Lebanese border and in the region of Aleppo to the north.
It was not immediately clear if the government had pulled the plug on Internet, triggering a blackout similar to a two-day outage that Syria experienced late last fall. Cellphone and phone services also were out in much of the country Wednesday.
Syrian authorities have in the past cut phone and Internet service in selected areas to disrupt rebel communications when regime forces were conducting major operations but widespread outages, however, have been rare.
The rebels and the government blamed one another for the blackout last year, which coincided with a major military operation in areas around the capital and near the Damascus International Airport.
Meanwhile, the Observatory and another activist group, the Aleppo Media Center, said opposition fighters shot down a fighter jet that was bombing rebel positions in the battle for the Mannagh airbase near the border with Turkey.
Rebels stormed the besieged air base on Sunday and the fighting is now taking place inside the sprawling facility, the activists said. Also Sunday, the rebels downed a military helicopter in the eastern Deir el-Zour region, killing eight government troops who were on board.
