The United States will dedicate aid worth 490 million dollars to Syrian refugees, with 77 million of them being directed to Lebanon, reported the daily An Nahar on Sunday.

The announcement was made during a meeting between Prime Minister Tammam Salam and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, Anne Richard on Friday, continued the daily.

Croatia on Saturday announced an unprecedented spike in the arrival of migrants on a long, dangerous journey towards western Europe as the continent's worst post-World War II refugee crisis showed no sign of abating.

With many of the people fleeing war and misery flocking towards Germany, a new poll showed Chancellor Angela Merkel's popularity at home has been hit by her policy of openness.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam said on Saturday that the humanitarian aspect of the Syrian refugee crisis is one of the biggest challenges facing development, calling for more assistance to Lebanon.

“The international community's reaction to a crisis of this size hasn't been at the required level,” Salam said at a U.N. development summit in New York.

The European Union's enlargement commissioner told the German Die Welt daily Saturday that the next wave of migration to Europe could come from Syria's neighbor, fragile Lebanon.

"Developments in Lebanon unsettle me. The situation there is ... dramatic," Johannes Hahn told the conservative-leaning daily.

Al-Mustaqbal movement leader Saad Hariri criticized on Saturday Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's position saying that the latter has linked the fate of Lebanon's presidency to that in Syria, dimming the hopes to have a head of state.

“Sayyed Hassan has announced that Lebanon will not have a president before knowing the fate of the presidency in Syria,” said Hariri via twitter.

Russia kept up its military buildup in Syria on Saturday with a fresh transport flight into a new airbase in the heartland of its regime ally, a Syrian military source told Agence France Presse.

It was the 15th straight day that a Russian transport aircraft had flown in troops and equipment to the Hmeimim base in Latakia province on the Mediterranean coast, the source said on condition of anonymity.

The Pentagon on Friday said a group of U.S.-trained Syrian rebels had handed over ammunition and equipment to al-Qaida's affiliate in the country, the Al-Nusra Front, purportedly in exchange for safe passage.

The startling acknowledgement contrasted with earlier Pentagon denials of reports that some fighters had either defected or handed over gear.

Russia has shocked the West by boosting its military presence in Syria as President Vladimir Putin seeks to not just defeat Islamic State radicals but also to gain a firm foothold in the strategic Middle Eastern country.

Putin has seized the initiative more than four years into a civil war that has killed more than 240,000 people and led to the emergence of IS, amid the collective failure of the international community to stop the violence.

A second French jihadist, Salim Benghalem, has been named as a possible jailer of Western hostages in Syria, a source close to the case told AFP on Friday. 

Benghalem was named along with Mehdi Nemmouche, who carried out a fatal attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels last year, as suspected jailers for the Islamic State group (IS). 

Germany estimates that 30 percent of incoming migrants claiming to be citizens of war-torn Syria are in fact from other countries, an interior ministry spokesman said Friday.

"It's an estimate based on the observations of officials on the ground, especially the federal police, the Office for Migration and Refugees and (EU border protection agency) Frontex," he said.