Beirut: Syrian air force jets bombarded rebel targets on Friday close to the Damascus airport road and a regional airline said the violence had halted international flights to the capital.

Delegates from more than 60 countries, meanwhile, were gathering in Tokyo to find ways to step up the pressure on President Bashar Al Assad’s regime.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the main road to Damascus from the airport, which was closed Thursday due to the fighting, had reopened but said a bus carrying airport employees had been hit by a shell, killing two people. “We want to liberate the airport because of reports we see and our own information we have that shows civilian airplanes are being flown in here with weapons for the regime. It is our right to stop this,” rebel spokesman Musaab Abu Qitada said.

Activists said security forces clashed with rebels trying to topple Al Assad around Aqraba and Babilla districts on the southeastern outskirts of the Damascus which lead to the international airport.

Internet connections and most telephone lines were down for a second day, the worst communications outage in a 20-month-old uprising in which 40,000 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have fled the country, and millions been displaced.

On Thursday, activists accused the regime of preparing a “massacre” when the telephone lines and internet first went down, while the authorities explained the cut was due to “maintenance” work.

Washington branded it as a desperate move on part of the regime.

But State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that some 2,000 communications sets supplied to opposition rebels over recent months as part of a US non-lethal assistance programme were not affected by the blackout.

Washington was weighing what further help it can give the opposition, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday, without spelling out if they would win full US recognition.

“We are going to carefully consider what more we can do,” Clinton told a Washington forum. “I’m sure we will do more in the weeks ahead.”

On Friday, delegates from more than 60 countries gathered in Tokyo, seeking to ramp up pressure on Assad.

Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba told the “Friends of Syria” group that the international community had to act together where the divided UN Security Council had failed.

“While the United Nations Security Council has been unable to assume its primary responsibility, it’s increasingly important for the international community to act as one in order to deal with” the continuing violence, he said.

The mostly Sunni rebels who are battling Al Assad, from Syria’s Alawite minority, have been making gains around Syria by overrunning military bases and have been ramping up attacks on Damascus, his seat of power.

A resident of central Damascus told Reuters he could see black smoke rising from the east and the south of the city on Friday morning and could hear the constant boom of shelling.

“Airlines are not operating to Damascus today,” said a Dubai-based airline official. EgyptAir and Emirates suspended flights to Syria on Thursday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based opposition monitoring group, said jets were bombarding targets in rural areas around Aqraba and Babilla, where rebels clashed with Al Assad’s forces.

The Observatory’s director, Rami Abdul Rahman, said the airport road was open, but there was minimal traffic.

Syrian authorities said late on Thursday that the airport road was safe after security forces cleared it of ‘terrorists’ - the label Damascus uses to describe Al Assad’s armed opponents.

US and European officials said rebels were making gains in Syria, gradually eroding Al Assad’s power, but said the fighting had not yet shifted completely in their favour.

A Damascus-based diplomat said he believed the escalation in fighting around the capital was part of a government offensive which aimed to seal off the state-controlled centre of the city from rebel-held rural areas to the south and east.

Activists say Al Assad’s forces have also been shelling the Daraya district to the southwest of the city, trying to prevent rebels from cementing their hold of an area which could give them a presence in a continuous arc from the northeast to southwest of the capital’s outer districts.

“I don’t know whether the shelling has succeeded in pushing back the FSA [rebels] — experience shows that they return very quickly anyway,” the diplomat said. “We seem to be entering a decisive phase of the Damascus offensive.”

Syria’s Internet shut down on Thursday, a move which activists blamed on authorities but which authorities variously attributed to a ‘terrorist’ attack or a technical fault.

CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate internet traffic, said on its blog that saboteurs would have had to simultaneously cut three undersea cables into the Mediterranean city of Tartous and also an overland cable through Turkey in order to cut off the entire country’s Internet access.