UN official calls crisis the 'biggest humanitarian emergency of our era'

The number of refugees from the conflict in Syria now tops 3 million, the United Nations said on Friday, and US President Barack Obama admitted he still has no strategy to tackle the advancing jihadists.

The chief of the UN refugee agency, Antonio Guterres, said Syria had become the "biggest humanitarian emergency of our era", after a million people joined the exodus in the past year and Islamic State fighters seized swaths of territory in the northeast.

The jihadists have sown panic with a spate of atrocities, including the execution of more than 160 captured Syrian soldiers and an Iraqi Kurdish fighter over the past week. Those killings followed its brutal beheading of US journalist James Foley earlier this month.

Dampening hopes that the US would quickly launch airstrikes in Syria, Obama said he was still developing a comprehensive plan to defeat IS, which has also overrun large areas of neighboring Iraq.

The civil war in Syria has killed some 191,000 people since it erupted in March 2011.

But it has taken on another dimension as IS jihadists exploited the power vacuum to move in, unleashing a series of atrocities that have shocked the world.

"We don't have a strategy yet," Obama said ahead of a meeting with security chiefs.

But he said he was dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to the Middle East to build sentiment in the region against IS.

Washington has so far balked at cooperating with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government against IS.

'Message in blood'

Obama reiterated that position on Thursday, saying: "I don't think there's a situation where we have to choose between Assad or the kinds of people who carry on the incredible violence that we've been seeing there."

Washington has carried out airstrikes in neighboring Iraq that have helped Kurdish forces claw back some of the territory they lost to a surging offense by the jihadists earlier this month.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership's military cooperation with the US 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 showed other captive Kurdish fighters and warned that they risk the same fate if the cooperation continues, the SITE Intelligence Group monitoring service said.

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.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon added his voice on Friday to the chorus of international condemnation.

"Whole communities that had lived for generations in northern Iraq are being forced to flee or face death just for their religious beliefs," he said.

The International Organization for Migration said on Friday that more than 1.6 million Iraqis have been displaced this year, more than 850,000 of them this month alone.

(China Daily 08/30/2014 page11)