Syrian warplanes bombed rebel areas near Damascus today as President Bashar Assad’s troops battled opposition fighters for control of the road linking the capital to the country’s largest airport.

A defiant president Bashar al-Assad presented what he described as an initiative yesterday to end the war in Syria, but his opponents dismissed it as a ploy to cling to power.

ON ONE hand, there are the (in Damascus, largely invisible) activists who are trying to bring down Bashar al Assad.