September 06, 2013 - The civil war in Syria has forced over 2 million people out
of the country and another 4.25 million are displaced within its borders, making Syrians
the nation with the largest number of people torn from their homes right now, United
Nations officials said this week. If the conflict continues 3.5 million people Syrian
refugees are expected by the end of the year, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
Antonio Guterres saod on Tuesday. “Syria has become the great tragedy of this century
_ a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled
in recent history,'' he told reporters in Geneva. Almost 5,000 citizens a day on
average are flowing out of Syria _ a country of some 23 million people, many of them
with little more than the clothes they are wearing, Guterres said. The number of refugees
has surged by 1.8 million in just 12 months _ up from almost 231,000 a year ago. ``What
is appalling is that the first million fled Syria during two years. The second million
fled Syria in (the past) six months,'' he said of the impact of the civil war, which
began as a rebellion against President Bashar Assad's regime in March 2011. "We have
now almost one-third of the Syria population that has been displaced, and half in
need of assistance.'' More than 97 per cent of Syria's refugees are hosted by countries
in the immediate surrounding region, which is impacting their infrastructures, economies
and societies and making them in need of urgent outside help, Guterres said. ``So
there are no words to express the dimension of this tragedy,'' he said. ``The only
solace is the humanity shown by the neighboring countries in welcoming and saving
the lives of so many refugees.'' As of the end of August, the agency counted 716,000
refugees in Lebanon, 515,000 in Jordan, 460,000 in Turkey, 168,000 in Iraq and 110,000
in Egypt. It said over half of them were children. That compares with Afghanistan's
refugee crisis, whose numbers once rivaled Syria's, but has subsided somewhat with
the repatriation of millions. Guterres noted that by comparison most Afghan refugees
fled to two countries, Pakistan and Iran, each of which had populations far greater
than the number of refugees they took in.