This image taken from video obtained from Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows Syrian rebels preparing to fire a rocket at Mannagh air base in Aleppo province, Syria, Monday, May 13, 2013. The Syrian government wants more details before deciding whether to take part in a proposed U.S.-Russian initiative to negotiate a peaceful end to Syria's crisis, the country's information minister said, staking out a similar position to the main opposition group.(AP Photo/Ugarit News via AP video)
This image taken from video obtained from Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows Syrian rebels preparing to fire a rocket at Mannagh air base in Aleppo province, Syria, Monday, May 13, 2013. The Syrian government wants more details before deciding whether to take part in a proposed U.S.-Russian initiative to negotiate a peaceful end to Syria's crisis, the country's information minister said, staking out a similar position to the main opposition group.(AP Photo/Ugarit News via AP video)
This image taken from video obtained from Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a rocket fired by Syrian rebels at Mannagh air base in Aleppo province, Syria, Monday, May 13, 2013. The Syrian government wants more details before deciding whether to take part in a proposed U.S.-Russian initiative to negotiate a peaceful end to Syria's crisis, the country's information minister said, staking out a similar position to the main opposition group.(AP Photo/Ugarit News via AP video)
In this image taken from video obtained from Ugarit News, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, Syrian rebels prepare to launch a rocket at Mannagh air base in Aleppo province, Syria, Monday, May 13, 2013. The Syrian government wants more details before deciding whether to take part in a proposed U.S.-Russian initiative to negotiate a peaceful end to Syria's crisis, the country's information minister said, staking out a similar position to the main opposition group.(AP Photo/Ugarit News via AP video)
This citizen journalism image provided by Lens Young Homsi, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows buildings which were destroyed from Syrian forces shelling, in Homs province, Syria, Tuesday, May 14, 2013. The Syrian government wants more details before deciding whether to take part in a proposed U.S.-Russian initiative to negotiate a peaceful end to Syria's crisis, the country's information minister said Tuesday, May 14, 2013, staking out a similar position to the main opposition group. (AP Photo/Lens Young Homsi)
BEIRUT (AP) ? Syrian rebels launched a coordinated assault on the main prison in the northern city of Aleppo Wednesday in an attempt to free hundreds of regime opponents believed to be held in the facility, activists said, while an Internet blackout engulfed the country for the second time in two weeks.
Aleppo emerged as one of the major fronts in the country's civil war after a rebel offensive there in July, and the fighting since then has settled into a bloody stalemate. The city, Syria's largest, holds strategic and symbolic value, and both sides have taken significant losses in the battle to expand the turf under their control.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said rebels detonated two car bombs simultaneously outside the walls of the central prison Wednesday morning before trying to storm the facility. Fierce clashes are taking place between President Bashar Assad's troops and opposition fighters around the detention center, according to Observatory director Rami Abdul-Rahman.
There were no immediate reports of casualties.
The city's central prison is believed to be holding some 4,000 prisoners, around 250 of whom are jailed for reasons related to the 26-month-old uprising against Assad's regime, said Abdul-Rahman, who relies on reports from a network of informants based in Syria.
For weeks, rebel fighters have been battling government troops in the area around the prison to try to seize the facility and free the prisoners. Earlier this month, the rebels overran the headquarters of the government's anti-terrorism forces that is located near the jail.
Wednesday's Internet outage, which Syria around 10:00 a.m. local time, appeared similar to last week's blackout, Syrian residents and the U.S.-based Renesys Corp. said.
"It looks like a replay of what happened on the seventh and eighth," Renesys chief technology officer James Cowie said by telephone, referring to last week's nationwide outage. He said the cause was not immediately clear.
"It's entirely consistent with a technical fault at a central facility; it's also completely consistent with a decision to use an Internet kill switch," he said.
Preliminary data from Google Inc.'s Transparency Report website also pointed to a nationwide blackout, with Syria's online traffic share nose-diving to 0 percent on Wednesday morning.
Syrian government websites, including the SANA state news agency, appeared to be down, but SANA reported on its twitter account a technical problem. It said maintenance units were working to restore the Internet as soon as possible. It did not elaborate.
An official at the Syrian communications department said an Internet cable was cut in a Damascus suburb and that it will take up to four hours to fix. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give official statements. He did not say what caused the cut.
Syrian authorities have shut off phone and Internet service in select areas in the past to disrupt rebel communications when regime forces were conducting major operations.
Such widespread blackouts, however, have been rare, and the reason for the May 7 outage is still unclear.
Also Wednesday, at least 23 rebel factions, including Islamic groups, joined forces in a push to reopen an arms supply route and retake a key town near Damascus that fell back to regime troops last month.
The rebel groups, including the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, battled government troops around the town of Otaybah, east of the capital, the Observatory said. The army regained control of Otaybah in late April, cutting the opposition's arms route between Jordan and the capital.
There are scores of rebel brigades in Syria. They operate without a unified command structure, but sometimes coordinate to increase their fighting power on individual operations.
In the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, clashes erupted after unknown gunmen disrupted a street march to mark the 65th anniversary of Palestinians' mass displacement during the war that followed Israel's founding in 1948, the state news agency said.
While many Palestinians in Syria have remained on the sidelines during a 26-month conflict, the Yarmouk camp has been the scene of heavy clashes between a small, pro-Assad group, The Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and armed Palestinians fighting on the opposition side.
More than 70,000 people have been killed since the revolt against Assad's rule erupted in March 2011, and over a million more have sought shelter in neighboring countries. Millions of others have been displaced inside Syria.
In Jordan, the U.N. refugee agency warned that the relentless fighting has been driving unprecedented numbers of Syrians into neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraqis, straining the countries' water and food resources to the limit.
Andrew Harper, the UNHCR representative to Jordan, said the U.N. has received only half of the $1.5 billion pledged by international donors to cover the refugees' needs until June.
A Jordanian government spokesman for Syrian refugee affairs, Anmar Hmoud, said Wednesday that the kingdom hosts 535,000 Syrian refugees, while more 150,000 have found shelter in the Zaatari camp near the border with Syria.
UNHCR expects that total number of Syrians in Jordan could double by the end of the year.
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AP writers Raphael Satter in London, Albert Aji in Damascus and Dale Gavlak in Amman, Jordan contributed to this report.
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