AFP/Damascus
The number of refugees from the conflict in Syria now tops three million, the UN said Friday, as US President Barack Obama admitted he has no strategy to tackle advancing jihadists.
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 Islamic State (IS) jihadists have sown panic with atrocities and executions, including of scores of Syrian soldiers and a US journalist this month alone.
The scale of the crisis facing the international community deepened after rival Islamists led by Al-Qaeda's Syria affiliate, Al-Nusra Front, seized 43 Fijian UN peacekeepers on the Golan Heights.
"The latest information we have is that they are safe and I can say now that the negotiations for their release have already begun," Fiji's Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama said in a statement.
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 hopes of imminent air strikes in Syria, 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," Obama said, adding however that he was dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to the Middle East to build support in the region against IS.
The Syria war, that has killed some 191,000 since it erupted in March 2011 when the government cracked down on protesters, has taken on a new dimension as IS unleashed brutality that has shocked the world.
And fears have spread across the globe, with Britain announcing Friday it had raised the terror level to "severe" due to concern that jihadists in Syria and Iraq were planning attacks on the West.
- 'Message in blood' -
Washington has carried out air strikes in Iraq that have helped Kurdish forces to claw back some of the territory they lost to a renewed offensive by the jihadists earlier this month.
This has infuriated the jihadists who posted grisly video footage on Thursday of their execution of a Kurdish fighter outside a mosque.
The video, titled "A message in blood to the leaders of the American-Kurdish alliance," also shows other captive Kurdish fighters warning that they risk the same fate if the cooperation continues, the SITE Intelligence Group monitoring service said.
The footage comes hot on the heels of a video shot by jihadists showing scores of bodies heaped in the desert that IS boasted were those of Syrian soldiers it captured and killed.
The jihadists have also carried out a spate of executions of civilians from religious minority groups in northern Iraq since they went back on the offensive.
On Friday, Iraqi aircraft struck jihadists besieging the Shiite Turkmen town of Amerli for more than two months, as government forces readied an offensive in the area, officers said.
Amerli residents are in grave danger both because of their Shiite faith, which jihadists consider heresy, and their resistance to the militants, which has drawn harsh retribution elsewhere.
"Whole communities that had lived for generations in northern Iraq are being forced to flee or face death just for their religious beliefs," said UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Friday.
His comment came as the International Organisation for Migration said that over 1.6 million Iraqis have been displaced this year, more than 850,000 of them this month alone.
"Many of their loved ones were killed or abducted by IS forces. Groups of people were reportedly forced by IS to jump off mountain cliffs, while others were taken away to an uncertain fate."
A UN-mandated probe has charged that public executions, amputations, lashings and mock crucifixions have also become a regular fixture in jihadist-controlled areas of Syria.
- UN peacekeepers held -
As the Fiji prime minister announced that negotiations were underway to free 43 of his countrymen captured in Syria, Manila said its citizens besieged by rebels were ready to use "deadly force" to defend themselves.
The UN peacekeepers from Fiji were forced to surrender their weapons and taken hostage, but the 75 Filipino blue helmets "held their ground" and refused to disarm, the Philippine defence department said.
The UN Security Council condemned the action and demanded the "unconditional and immediate release" of the peacekeepers.
Peacekeepers were detained twice last year before being released safely.
Meanwhile, Hollywood star and goodwill ambassador for the UN refugee agency Angelina Jolie made a plea for the end of Syria's three-and-a-half war.
"Three million refugees is not just another statistic. It is a searing indictment of our collective failure to end the war in Syria," she said.
