Eurasia Press & News
More than two million Syrians have now fled their war-ravaged country, the UN refugee agency said Tuesday, lamenting the nearly 10-fold increase from a year ago.
“Syria is haemorrhaging women, children and men who cross borders often with little more than the clothes on their backs,” the UNHCR said in a statement, pointing out that on September 3, 2012, it had registered just 230,671 Syrian refugees.
In addition to the two million Syrians living as refugees, some 4.25 million people have been displaced within the devastated country since the conflict began in March 2011, according to UN figures.
A staggering 6.2 million Syrians have thus been torn from their homes – a number without parallel in any other country and representing nearly a third of Syria’s pre-war population of 20.8 million.
“Syria has become the great tragedy of this century,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement, describing the situation in the country as “a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparallelled in recent history.”
The only solace, he said, “is the humanity shown by the neighbouring countries in welcoming and saving the lives of so many refugees.”
In the past 12 months, almost 1.8 million people have flooded out of Syria, and an average of 5,000 continue to cross into neighbouring countries each day, UNHCR said, pointing out that on August 23, the number of Syrian children living as refugees topped one million.
