Syrian troops have captured a key town southeast of Damascus, as they sought to "tighten the noose" around suburbs struck by chemical weapons in August, a military source said.
The Syrian opposition, meanwhile, says it will meet on November 9 to decide whether to attend a Geneva peace conference that the United Nations is trying to convene in parallel with chemical disarmament efforts.
Syria is set to hand over a detailed plan for destroying its chemical arsenal on Thursday, part of a UN-backed disarmament bid that averted US military strikes after the August 21 sarin gas attack, which killed hundreds of people.
A military source told AFP troops had recaptured Hteitit al-Turkman, describing it as an "important centre for the terrorists," the regime's term for the rebels who rose up against it in 2011.
The operation was part of a larger effort to close in on Eastern Ghouta, a ring of suburbs besieged by government troops for months, which were targeted in the August chemical attack.
Damascus has denied US allegations it carried out the attack.
Syrian authorities were meanwhile working to restore power after rebels attacked a gas pipeline on Wednesday, causing blackouts across the country and setting off a huge fire near the airport, where a key power plant is located.
Electricity Minister Emad Khamis said on Thursday that the fire had been extinguished and that power was being "gradually" restored to some provinces, according to the official SANA news agency.
Elsewhere in Syria, Kurdish fighters battled with jihadists for several hours as they advanced on a border crossing with Iraq held by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an Al-Qaeda affiliate that operates in both countries.
And in the central city of Homs a car bomb killed at least one person and wounded 43, state television reported.
Some 115,000 people have been killed and millions driven from their homes since a brutal crackdown on Arab Spring-inspired protests in the spring of 2011 set off a full-scale civil war.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) says Syria is expected to hand over its disarmament plan by Thursday, the latest step in a US-Russian accord which calls for all Syria's chemical weapons and production facilities to be destroyed by mid-2014.
A joint UN-OPCW team, in Syria since the start of the month, has inspected 18 of 23 declared sites, destroying production equipment in almost all of them.
Sweden said on Thursday it will aid the disarmament effort by providing an air force unit and a Lockheed C-130 military transport plane, to be based in Cyprus.
But parallel efforts by the United Nations to convene a peace conference in Geneva next month have run into resistance from the fractured opposition, which is insisting on a raft of preconditions.
Leaders of the National Coalition -- the main opposition umbrella group -- have insisted they will not attend unless regime change and Assad's departure are on the table.
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