Dozens of heavily armed Philippine peacekeepers defied Syrian rebels on Friday in a Golan Heights standoff, hours after the fighters took hostage 43 Fijian soldiers there, the Filipinos' commander said.

Seventy-five Filipino troops were defending two fortified posts in the U.N.-patrolled zone after armed groups surrounded them on Thursday and demanded they give up their weapons, Colonel Roberto Ancan told reporters in Manila.

The number of refugees from the Syria conflict now tops three million, the U.N. said Friday, as U.S. President Barack Obama admitted he has no strategy to tackle advancing jihadists.

In Geneva, U.N. 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.

Head of Arsal Municipality Ali al-Hujeiri described the situation in the northeaster town as “calm,” lashing out at attempts to involve the army in armed clashes by reporting rumors.

“The situation in Arsal is calm and normal, but gunmen remain scattered on the outskirts of the town,” Hujeiri told al-Liwaa newspaper published on Friday.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday slammed "brutal killings of civilians" by Islamic State jihadists in northern Iraq, saying the Sunni radical group was tearing apart whole communities.

The jihadists have taken control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria, and have declared a "caliphate" in the territory they control straddling the two countries.

U.S. President Barack Obama admitted Thursday that he still does not have a strategy to fight Islamic State jihadists in Syria, as the militants boasted they had executed scores of Syrian troops -- the latest in a string of atrocities that have shocked the world.

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

At least four Western hostages held by the Islamic State in Syria, including murdered American journalist James Foley, were waterboarded in the early part of their captivity, The Washington Post said Thursday.

Foley, whose recent execution at the hands of the extremists provoked revulsion, and the other kidnapped Westerners were waterboarded "several times," the newspaper said, citing people familiar with their treatment.

Islamic State jihadists posted grisly video footage Thursday of scores of bodies heaped in the desert they boasted were those of Syrian soldiers they captured and executed in their latest advance.

The dead were dressed only in their underwear, stripped of any uniform, after what IS said was a mass execution of government troops following their capture of a key northern air base on Sunday.

Syrian armed groups, some of whom are linked to al-Qaida, captured 43 U.N. peacekeepers on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights on Thursday and surrounded 81 others, the U.N. said.

The 43 peacekeepers from Fiji were forced to surrender their weapons and taken hostage near the Quneitra crossing, but 81 Filipino blue helmets "held their ground" and refused to disarm, the Filipino defense department said.

Police in the Netherlands and Germany have arrested two men for allegedly recruiting jihadi fighters to go to Iraq and Syria, Dutch police said Thursday.

A woman was also held with the man arrested in Germany as part of a long-running investigation, police said in a statement.

Syria's Bashar Assad is not the West's partner in the fight against terrorism but an ally of Islamic extremists wreaking havoc in Syria and Iraq, French President Francois Hollande warned Thursday.

"Assad cannot be a partner in the fight against terrorism, he is the de facto ally of jihadists," he told a Paris gathering of ambassadors from around the world.