DAMASCUS: The number of refugees from the Syrian conflict had topped three million, the UN said on Friday.

In Geneva, UN refugee agency chief Antonio Guterres said Syria had become the “biggest humanitarian emergency of our era” after a million people joined the exodus in the past year alone.

They have fled the war-wracked country where militants of the Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, have sown panic with atrocities and executions, including of scores of Syrian soldiers and a US journalist.

The scale of the crisis facing the international community deepened after Islamists led by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Al-Nusra Front, seized 43 Fijian UN peacekeepers on the Golan Heights.

The militants also surrounded 75 Filipino peacekeepers, sparking a tense standoff for the UN mission that has monitored a Syrian-Israeli armistice on the strategic plateau for decades.

Dampening prospects of imminent air strikes in Syria, Mr Obama said he was still developing a comprehensive plan to defeat IS, which has overrun large swathes of neighbours Iraq and Syria.

“We don’t have a strategy yet,” he said, adding however that he was sending Secretary of State John Kerry to the Middle East to build regional support against IS.

The Syrian war has killed some 191,000 people since March 2011 but has taken on a new dimension as IS unleashed a brutality that has shocked the world.

Washington has launched air strikes in Iraq that have helped Kurdish forces claw back some territory lost to a renewed militant offensive earlier this month.

This has infuriated the Islamists who posted grisly video footage on Thursday of their execution of a Kurdish fighter.

The video also shows other captive Kurds warning that they risk the same fate if such cooperation continues, the SITE Intelligence Group monitoring service said.

Meanwhile, Hollywood star and goodwill ambassador for the UN refugee agency Angelina Jolie made a plea for the end of Syria’s war.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2014