Damascus | featured news

Internet services in Syria's capital resume after a two-day blackout, as clashes between government forces and rebels around Damascus intensify.

Syrian hospital officials say twin car bombs have killed at least 34 people in a Damascus suburb.

Syrian jets bombarded Sunni Muslim regions in Damascus and around the country on Sunday, activists said, as President Bashar al-Assad kept up air strikes against rebels despite a U.N.-brokered truce that now appears to be in tatters.

Syrian soldiers backed by tanks entered the Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya on Tuesday, killing at least 20 young men and burning shops and houses before gradually withdrawing from the town, residents and opposition activists said.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad performed Eid prayers in a Damascus mosque on Sunday, state television showed, in his first appearance in public since a July bombing in the Syrian capital that killed four top security officials.

Syrian Prime Minister Riyad Hijab has defected to the opposition seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, a spokesman for Hijab said on Monday, marking one of the highest profile desertions from the Damascus government.

Armed clashes erupted in at least three Syrian cities on Friday amid reports of a deadly mortar attack on a major Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, an event that threatened to draw Syria’s displaced Palestinian population into its civil war... Western nations, led by the United States, have accused Russia of helping to sabotage Mr. Annan’s diplomacy and have questioned the need for a United Nations monitoring presence in Syria if there is no viable peace plan to monitor.

Government forces claimed to have retaken a pocket of Damascus, as state television reported that a fourth member of President Bashar al-Assad’s elite circle died of wounds from Wednesday’s rebel bombing.

Syrian government forces struck back against rebels with attack helicopters and shelling around Damascus Thursday after an audacious bomb attack that killed three senior members of the ruling regime.

Syrian state television said Wednesday that a bombing in Damascus killed Defense Minister Daoud Rajha and his deputy, Asef Shawkat, who was the brother-in-law and close confidante of President Bashar al-Assad.