Algeria strains to provide for over 30,000 refugees from Syria, Libya, Mali

The “Arab Spring” revolutions and the current regional security situation have combined to turn Algeria into a temporary home for some 30,000 refugees from Syria, Libya and Mali.
Bin Olwi Mohy el-Din, a member of the African Association for Care of Refugees Affairs, an NGO, told Anadolu Agency that the association had counted more than 30,000 refugees in Algeria from the three countries, “most of whom fled their countries because of civil war”.
Half of the refugees are from Mali.
Algerian authorities have laid out a plan to meet refugees’ needs without forcing them into camps and allowing their children to enter the local school system, according to Mohy el-Din.
For his part, Addas Khalifa, a Syrian national and a member of the Syrian Refugees League in Northern African Countries, told Anadolu Agency that the number of Syrian refugees in Algeria changes “from one month to the next”.
He put the number of Syrian refugees in the country at 7,000, citing statistics issued by the Algerian authorities in April of last year.
Khalifa asserted that Syrians had been welcomed in Algeria without a visa until 2015, when Algeria began requiring visas due to developments in the war-torn country.
“The special circumstances in Syria forced the Algerian authorities to do security checks on incoming refugees to ensure that no extremists are among them,” Khalifa said.
Syrian refugees currently reside in 22 Algerian cities. The majority of them live in big cities, such as Annaba, Oran and capital Algiers, according to Khalifa.

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