As details trickle out, the decade of captivity looks predictably awful for Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight

Monday evening's escape/rescue of three abducted Cleveland women, after a decade of captivity, was a too-rare happy ending to three missing-persons cases. The young women — Georgina (Gina) DeJesus, 23, Michelle Knight, 30, and Amanda Berry, 27, plus Berry's 6-year-old daughter — were released from the hospital to their joyous families on Tuesday. "This is not the ending we all thought it would be," said CNN correspondent Martin Savidge. "We know, as reporters, it usually does not turn out this way. And we're thrilled that we're wrong."

"But this is not the ending," says Emily Bazelon at Slate, "and surely little other than the escape will seem happy once the facts begin to flow. That's already clear from the frantic tone of Amanda Berry's voice when she called 911." Police say they're taking it slow with the rescued women, and meticulously searching the home of the lead suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, who was arrested Monday along with brothers Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50.

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But while the police are being cautious, the media is uncovering some chilling details of the decade-long abduction and the men allegedly responsible for imprisoning three teenage girls. Here, six new details about the Cleveland abduction nightmare:

1. The three women were reportedly chained, raped, and beaten
The unverified glimpses we are getting of the decade of captivity are predictably grim, with anonymous law enforcement officials saying the women were repeatedly raped, beaten, and kept in chains for a least part of their captivity. Only one child, Berry's, was reported living in the house, but police sources tell Cleveland's NewsChannel5 that the women collectively had at least five miscarriages, with one woman's two or three miscarriages blamed on malnutrition.

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Friends and family members say that Ariel Castro didn't generally let anybody into the house, and his son, Anthony, tells Britain's Daily Mail that he had little contact with his father, and that his dad had designated several rooms as off-limits. "The house was always locked," Anthony said. "There were places we could never go. There were locks on the basement. Locks on the attic. Locks on the garage." Anthony's mom moved him and his three sisters out of the house in 1996 after years of violent abuse, the younger Castro says.

2. Neighbors reported naked, leashed girls in Castro's backyard
Police were called to Ariel Castro's house at least twice since he bought the property in 1992 — once for a domestic violence arrest in 1993, and in January 2004, when Castro, a school bus driver until recently, left a child on a bus while he went to have dinner at Wendy's, telling the kid to "lay down." But neighbors say they called the the cops more times than that.

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Israel Lugo, who lives two houses down from Castro, says he, his family, and neighbors called the police on Castro three times in 2011 and 2012 — after his sister saw a woman and infant banging on a half-boarded-over window, again after his mom saw Castro unload an unusually large amount of McDonald's food from his school bus to the house, and once more after neighbors across the street saw three men controlling three naked young women on leashes, crawling on all fours in Castro's backyard. Another neighbor, Elsie Cintron, says her daughter witnessed a similar incident, one woman crawling naked in Castro's backyard several years ago, but when she called the police "they didn't take it seriously." Lugo says the police responded to his family's calls, but left when nobody answered the door.

"Everyone in the neighborhood did what they had to do," Lupe Collins tells The Associated Press. "The police didn't do their job."

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3. Castro was active in the search for Gina DeJesus
Ariel Castro, "just like everyone else in the tight-knit, mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood, seemed shaken by the 2004 disappearance of Gina DeJesus" and Amanda Berry, say the AP's Thomas J. Sheeran and John Coyne. That seemed only natural, Khalid Samad, a friend of the DeJesus clan, tells the AP. Castro was friends with Felix DeJesus, Gina's father, and played in a band with Tito DeJesus, Gina's uncle. "When we went out to look for Gina, [Castro] helped pass out fliers," says Samad. "You know, he was friends with the family."

Castro also played at a benefit in Gina DeJesus' honor. And adding another layer of creepy, Castro appeared at a candlelight vigil for DeJesus a year ago, and had the gall to comfort Gina's mother, according to attendee Antony Quiros.

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4. Castro's daughter Arlene and Gina DeJesus were friends
Not only was Castro friendly with Gina's father, but his daughter Arlene was really close to Gina. Arlene was the last person to see Gina before her disappearance, according to a 2005 interview withAmerica's Most Wanted (watch below), on which she was introduced as Gina's "best friend and classmate."

Arlene said she and Gina were walking home from school, en route to play at Gina's house, when Gina lent her 50 cents to call her mom. Arlene's mom said no to spending the afternoon at the DeJesus house, and Gina — now 50 cents shy of a bus fare — started walking home alone.

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5. Another one of Ariel Castro's daughters, Emily, is in jail for attempted infanticide
If convicted, Ariel Castro won't be the only member of his family in prison. His daughter Emily isserving 25 years in Indiana for trying to kill her 11-month-old daughter in 2007. Emily, then 19, was apparently distraught after her boyfriend (and the baby's father) moved out. She tried to slit the infant's throat, then her own, and then tried to drown herself in a nearby creek. Court records say that Emily has a long history of manic depression.

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6. Ariel Castro was fired in November for leaving his bus
From 1991 until last November, Castro was a bus driver for the Cleveland public school district. He was fired because of a September 2012 incident in which he left his bus unattended for four hours while he went home to "rest." But that was just the last straw. Castro had been suspended at least three times before — for leaving the child on the bus during his Wendy's run, for hanging a U-turn with a full bus in busy traffic in 2009, and for using his bus to go shopping in February 2012.

That last fact is odd because Castro's father reportedly owned an auto dealership and he and his eight siblings reportedly always drove nice cars. "They never drove junk," longtime friend Nelson Romantells The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Roman says that the other arrested brothers, Pedro and Onil, ruined their health and employment prospects with alcoholism; Pedro lived at his mother's house, subsisting on Social Security, while Onil has been on disability for five years and lived alone. "They were all good kids," Roman adds. "That's why this news is devastating. It's not only horrifying to the families of the kidnapped girls, it's devastating to us, because these brothers were all very good kids who grew up in a very good family."

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BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian troops pushed Wednesday into a strategic town along the highway leading to the Jordanian border as a massive Internet outage engulfed most of the country for a second day.

The regime's advance into Khirbet Ghazaleh, a town south of Damascus along a key artery to the border, came after weeks of fighting and government attempts to secure the highway.

The push was part of a wider offensive against rebels in which President Bashar Assad's troops have regained some areas around Damascus, in the central province of Homs near the Lebanese border and in the region of Aleppo to the north.

The violence came as Iran, one of Assad's strongest allies, declared that it is ready to help any attempt to end Syria's crisis. In an opinion published in Lebanon's daily Al-Akhbar, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi wrote that it is up to the Syrian people to choose their political system and president.

It was not immediately clear if the government had pulled the plug on the Internet, triggering a blackout similar to a two-day outage that Syria experienced late last fall. Cellphone and phone services also were out in much of the country on Wednesday.

Syrian authorities have in the past cut phone and Internet service in selected areas to disrupt rebel communications when regime forces were conducting major operations. Widespread outages, however, have been rare.

The rebels and the government blamed one another for the blackout last year, which coincided with a major military operation in areas around the capital and near Damascus International Airport.

Syrian newspapers said Wednesday there was a technical problem in one of the cables and workers had started to fix it.

Meanwhile, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and another activist group, the Aleppo Media Center, said opposition fighters shot down a fighter jet that was bombing rebel positions in the battle for the Mannagh air base near the border with Turkey.

Rebels stormed the besieged air base on Sunday and the fighting is now taking place inside the sprawling facility, the activists said. Also Sunday, the rebels downed a military helicopter in the eastern Deir el-Zour region, killing eight government troops who were on board.

Assad's forces on Wednesday attacked a military post they had lost to the rebels earlier in the northern town of Khan al-Assal, the two activist groups said.

The Observatory reported heavy fighting in Qusair, a town near the Lebanese border under government siege. Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Observatory, said mediation is underway between people close to the regime and some regional "elements" to make the rebels withdraw from the town although many are still rejecting to leave.

As the violence continued on the ground, the United States and Russia, a key ally of Assad's government, said they'll convene a new international conference later this month to build on a transition plan they set out last year in Geneva.

Speaking in Moscow after his discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other officials, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the plan should be a roadmap for peace and not just a "piece of paper."

The goal is still to bring the Assad regime and representatives from the opposition together for talks on setting up an interim government, Kerry said Tuesday. The Geneva plan, which never gained traction, allowed each side to veto candidates it found unacceptable.

The Geneva proposal also calls for an open-ended cease-fire and the formation of a transitional government to run the country until new elections can be held and a new constitution drafted.

The international envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, welcomed the Russian-U.S. initiative, saying it marks "the first hopeful news" concerning Syria "in a very long time."

"The statements made in Moscow constitute a very significant first step forward. It is nevertheless only a first step," Brahimi said in a statement.

Brahimi has expressed frustrations with the inability to find a political solution to Syria's conflict, and has lamented the divisions on the U.N. Security Council that have prevented any international action from being taken.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared support on Wednesday for the proposed U.S.-Russia international conference, saying that "it is a hopeful signal that the United States and Russia are now jointly proposing such a conference."

"The solution now must be a political one," she added. "We are convinced that President Assad has lost his legitimacy but we also know that we have to organize a political process within which the whole (transition) can be implemented."

Salehi, Iran's foreign minister who met Assad on Tuesday, wrote that he sees no solution in Syria other than Syrians "choosing their own fate, system and president through a fair and transparent political and electoral process." He added that "only the Syrian people are the ones who decide the political system in Syria and the name of the ruler."

"Iran is ready to make successful any fair initiative that guarantees the interests of the Syrian people and restores stability to this country," he wrote.

Syrian officials have said that Assad will stay in his post until his seven-year term ends next year and he will run again. The Syrian opposition says it will not accept anything less than Assad's departure.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu accused Syrian forces of "ethnic cleansing" in the coastal city of Banias, where activists said troops and pro-government Alawite gunmen killed at least 62 Sunnni Muslims last week.

"It is ethnic cleansing. The aim is to frighten people and drive them away," said Davutoglu in an interview with Turkey's Hurriyet newspaper. Although Sunnis are majority among Syrians and mostly back the opposition, the Syrian coast is inhabited by Christians and members of Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Meanwhile, in southern Syria, rebels were holding four U.N. peacekeepers who were abducted Tuesday near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The abduction was the second such incident in the area in two months. It exposed the vulnerability of the U.N. peacekeeping mission during the Syrian civil war and sent a worrisome signal to Syria's neighbors — including Israel — about the ensuing lawlessness along their shared frontiers.

Syria's two-year crisis that has so far claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people, according to the United Nations.

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Associated Press writer Juergen Baetz in Berlin and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey contributed to this report.