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The United Nations on Friday said that there are now over three million Syrian refugees due to the civil war in Syria, as US President Barack Obama revealed that the US government has no strategy in place to tackle the advancing extremists.
António Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in Geneva that Syria has become the “biggest humanitarian emergency of our era”, with more than one million people joining the exodus last year alone. Syrians have been fleeing their war-wracked country as extremists from the Islamic State (IS) continue to spread panic with executions and other atrocities, including killing hundreds of Syrian soldiers and a US journalist in this month alone.
Dampening hopes of any air strikes in Syria, US President Barack Obama said that he was still developing a complete strategy to defeat the IS, which has run over swathes of territory in Syria and neighbor Iraq.
“We don’t have a strategy yet”, he said, before adding that he will dispatch US Secretary of State John Kerry to the Middle East and build support against the IS.
The Syrian civil war has caused the deaths of around 191,000 people since it began in March 2011 when the Syrian regime cracked down on protesters. It has recently taken a new dimension, with the IS unleashing a wave of brutality that has shocked the world.
Fear of the IS has spread across the world, with the UK announcing on Friday that it had raised the terror level to “severe” due to concern that extremists in Iraq and Syria were planning to carry out attacks in the West.
The United States has carried out air strikes in Iraq which have helped Kurdish troops re-gain some of the territory they had lost to a renewed extremist offensive earlier in the month. The move has infuriated the extremists, who on Thursday posted a gruesome video of the execution of a Kurdish soldier outside a mosque.
