The Internet is down again in Syria, according to the Renesys Corp., an Internet monitoring company.

The company tweeted the development Wednesday as the civil war there raged on. Last week, also on Wednesday, Internet access in Syria was restored after a widespread outage that lasted more than 19 hours.

Violence persisted Wednesday. Clashes broke out between rebel fighters and regime troops at the Aleppo central prison, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The Israeli military said several Syrian rockets landed in the Mount Hermon area of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, on the border with Syria.



Diplomatic moves

In Sweden on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed the revival of a peace initiative based on last year's Geneva conference.

That conference, brokered by Russia and the United States, outlined how a transitional government could be formed.

"I think it's fair to say that both of us are confident about the direction that we're moving in and very, very hopeful that within in a short period of time, the pieces will have come together fully so that the world, hopefully, will have an opportunity to be given an alternative to the violence and destruction that is taking place in Syria at this moment," Kerry said.

Lavrov cited the Russian-American proposal to convene a conference to start implementing the Geneva communique last June.

"It's self-explanatory, and what we need now is to mobilize support for this initiative on the basis of what was, I believe, in Geneva and what was proposed by Washington and Moscow: to mobilize support, first of all, by all the Syrian groups, the regime and all opposition groups; and second by those outside actors who have influence on either one or the other Syrian group."