UN registers Lebanon's millionth Syrian refugee

April 04, 2014 - The number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon registered with the United Nations on Thursday crossed the 1 million mark, with the organization’s refugee agency describing it as a “devastating milestone”' for the tiny Arab country with depleted resources and an explosive sectarian mix of its own. “The extent of the human tragedy is not just the recitation of numbers,” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees representative Ninette Kelley told reporters in Lebanon's second largest city, Tripoli, April 3. The UNHCR said Thursday the 1 million Syrians are a huge burden for Lebanon, which has 4.5 million people. “Each one of these numbers represents a human life who ... have lost their homes, their family members, their sense of future,” Kelley. The U.N. refugee agency officially registered an 18-year-old student from Homs as its millionth refugee in Tripoli. One year ago, the country was host to 356,000 U.N.-registered refugees.
Three years after Syria's conflict started, Lebanon has become the country with the highest per-capita concentration of refugees worldwide, struggling to cope with a massive crisis that has become an unprecedented challenge for aid agencies. Also, Syria's sectarian war has frequently spilled over into Lebanon, with deadly clashes between factions supporting opposing sides in the fighting next door. Some 6.5 million Syrians are believed to have been internally displaced by the war, and there are 2.6 million Syrian refugees living in nearby countries, most of them in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan.