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The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes is the highest since World War II.

According to a new report from the United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, 65.6 million people are currently living as refugees or as displaced persons inside their own countries. This includes 10.3 million people who were uprooted from their homes in 2016.

Syria continues to be the largest source of refugees. According to the U.N., 12 million Syrians — more than half the country's population — have been forced from their homes. Five million have fled to neighboring countries and Europe, while the rest remain inside Syria, officially labeled as displaced persons.

Syria is also the largest source of new refugees: 824,000 in 2016. It was followed by South Sudan, where 740,000 people fled the country because of the brutal civil war. There are now 1.4 million South Sudanese refugees abroad, along with 1.9 million internally displaced people.

Neighboring Uganda has taken in hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese over the last three years. In 2016, the Bidi Bidi camp in Uganda grew so much it's now the largest refugee camp in the world, giving shelter to more than 270,000 South Sudanese.

Here are some of the surprising facts and trends from this new report.

1. A shockingly high percent of the world's displaced are kids.

More than half the refugees around the globe are under the age of 18, even though children make up 31 percent of the world's population.

2. Many of these kids are fleeing alone.

In 2016 alone, according to UNHCR, 75,000 children applied for asylum as "unaccompanied minors." Most were from Afghanistan and Syria. The country receiving the greatest number of requests for asylum for these children was Germany: 35,900.

3. The greatest burden of the global refugee crisis falls on low-income and middle-income countries.

Turkey remains the largest host of refugees globally, with nearly 3 million living inside its borders. Pakistan is second. Among the top ten host nations only one is a high-income country: Germany, at number 8 on the list, hosting 669,500 refugees and asylum seekers.

4. Most people who are driven from their homes by armed conflict don't end up officially as refugees.

If they haven't crossed an international border, the U.N. designates them as "internally displaced persons" or IDPs. In 2016 there were 40.3 million internally displaced persons around the world, far overshadowing the 25.3 million refugees. From the UN's perspective this is an important distinction. Refugees fall under the auspice of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and are entitled to certain rights and basic assistance. IDPs are the responsibility of their own government, often the government that failed to protect them in their homes in the first place.

5. Colombia has the highest number of IDPs in the world: 7.6 million.

A huge portion of its population are internally displaced because of the decades-long conflict between the FARC rebels and the government.

Syria had the second highest number of people listed as internally displaced last year, with just over 6 million.

5 Surprising Facts About The Refugee Crisis,
NPR,
June 20, 2017
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/06/20/
533634405/five-surprising-facts-about-the-refugee-crisis

Flow of Refugees Out of Syria

Passes Two Million

September 3, 2013

The New York Times

By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE

GENEVA — As the United States and its allies struggled for a course of action to punish the use of chemical weapons in Syria, the United Nations said the number of civilians who had fled to neighboring countries had surpassed two million — a new milestone in what it called “the great tragedy of this century, a disgraceful humanitarian calamity.”

Fear of Western airstrikes in the past week was a factor in an exodus that continued to gather momentum, inflicting acute social strain and political tension on receiving countries, António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said in an interview in Geneva on Monday.

It took two years of conflict in Syria for the refugee figure to reach one million, but only six more months to reach two million, Mr. Guterres noted. In addition, at least 4.5 million people have been driven from their homes inside Syria by the destruction and violence, meaning that close to one-third of the country’s population has been displaced by the civil war, and about half the population has needed humanitarian aid, Mr. Guterres said, putting Syria’s crisis at a level unseen in recent decades.

About 40,000 Syrians fled to Iraq in the last two weeks of August, and 13,000 arrived in Lebanon in the past week. Over all, close to 5,000 Syrians are leaving every day.

“It clearly demonstrates that we are witnessing a conflict in constant escalation,” Mr. Guterres said. “We have to be prepared for things to get much worse before, eventually, they start to get better.”

By the end of August, Lebanon had more than 716,000 Syrians who were registered as refugees with the United Nations and many more who were unregistered, he said, meaning that perhaps one of every four people in the country is a Syrian. About 515,000 Syrians were on the United Nations register in Jordan, 460,000 in Turkey, 168,000 in Iraq and 110,000 in Egypt, with many more likely to be unregistered.

“These countries need massive support from the international community to be able to cope with the challenge,” Mr. Guterres said, emphasizing the acute strain the refugee influx has placed on their economies and social resources. “If that support does not materialize, the risks of instability in the Middle East will dramatically increase.”

Ministers of the four most affected countries will meet in Geneva on Wednesday to work out a common approach on the assistance they need, which will be laid out to donor countries meeting in Geneva at the end of the month.

The international response so far has fallen far short of what is needed, Mr. Guterres warned. Turkey has received financial assistance equivalent to less than 10 percent of what it has spent to support the refugees, he said. Financial backing for Jordan and Lebanon was “totally inadequate,” he added.

The United Nations refugee agency says it has received $548 million, or less than half the $1.1 billion it had sought, to pay for relief for Syrian refugees in 2013. Most came from traditional Western donors, led by the United States, which contributed $228 million, or 40 percent of what the agency has received. European countries, Japan, Canada and Australia have together accounted for about 33 percent. Kuwait has contributed $112 million, or about 20 percent.

By contrast, Russia, the Syrian government’s main ally, has given $10 million. China, which has helped Russia block any authorization of military action against Syria in the United Nations Security Council, has given $1 million.

The scale of need created by the Syrian crisis outstrips any humanitarian relief budget, Mr. Guterres said. “This requires a mobilization of more development-related forms of assistance,” he said, or Syria’s crisis could drain the resources for humanitarian disasters in other parts of the world.

Because the devastation is so far-reaching, he said, it defies “a humanitarian solution.”

“The solution will have to be political,” Mr. Guterres said. “If no political solution is found, this will assume really catastrophic proportions.”