Internet service resumes in Syria

DAMASCUS - The internet service in Syria has resumed Saturday after a two-day outage, the state-run SANA news agency said.

The Syrian government blamed the outage in internet service and mobile coverage in some areas on the armed groups' sabotage acts against cellular broadcast centers.

The internet outage has been coupled with a wide-scale military operation in the suburbs of the capital Damascus, most notably on the road to the international airport of Damascus.

Media reports said intense clashes are incessant around Damascus, as the armed rebels have been trying to storm the capital from deferent routes over the past couple of days.

The pro-government Sham FM radio said as many as 19 armed men were killed on Saturday in the Damascus' suburb of Douma.

The Syrian government says it is fighting groups of al-Qaida terror network on its territories, accusing Turkey and other countries in the Arab Gulf of providing the armed groups with cover and facilitating inroads for them into Syria.

A day earlier, Lebanese sources said the Syrian army killed at least 17 radical Lebanese fighters after sneaking into Syria.

Meanwhile, the pan-Arab al-Manar al-Makdisieh newspaper said that as many as 137 foreign intelligence officers are now in the custody of the Syrian security forces.