DAMASCUS, Syria, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- Residents of Damascus and some other areas in Syria were able to access the Internet and use cellphones Saturday after a two-day countrywide blackout.
Fighting between rebel forces and the government of President Bashar Assad was unabated, with Syrian forces bombarding rebel-held areas around the Damascus airport, CNN reported. The Local Coordination Committees of Syria said 73 people were killed Saturday, 23 of them in Damascus and 20 in Aleppo.
The government blamed the rebels for the Internet outage that began Thursday. But Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of the Internet security firm CloudFlare, told CNN that was unlikely because four major cables would have had to be cut simultaneously for the Internet to go down across the entire country.
The BBC reported many flight cancellations Thursday and Friday at the Damascus airport. In an audio statement Friday, a man using the name Abu Eyaad, speaking for the Revolutionary Military Council in Damascus and its suburbs, said the airport had been completely closed down, something the government disputed, CNN said.
Eyaad called the airport "the gate of death that supplies the regime in Damascus and its suburbs with more tools to kill the Syrian people," saying that is how military supplies from Russia reach Syria.
