Most displaced Syrians are in the Middle East, and
about a million are in Europe, by Phillip Connor, 1/28/18
Displaced Syrians from Deir
Ezzor head to refugee camps on the outskirts of Raqqa on Sept. 24 as Syrian
fighters backed by U.S. special operations forces battle to capture ISIS’s last
remaining stronghold.
Nearly 13 million
Syrians are displaced after seven years of conflict in their country – a total
that amounts to about six-in-ten of Syria’s pre-conflict population, according
to Pew Research Center estimates. No nation in recent decades has had such a large percentage of its population displaced. These
are the countries and regions where the most Syrians now live:
More than 6 million Syrians are internally displaced within their own
country, accounting
for about half (49%) of all displaced Syrians worldwide. This number has
remained little changed in recent years, as hundreds of thousands of
Syrians have returned to their homes and slightly higher
numbers have become newly displaced, according to midyear 2017 population
estimates from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). In the first half of 2017, for
example, nearly 700,000 Syrians were newly displaced within the country due to
the ongoing conflict.
More than 5 million displaced Syrians live in neighboring countries in
the Middle East and North Africa. Those in Turkey (3.4 million), Lebanon (1 million), Jordan
(660,000) and Iraq (250,000) account for about four-in-ten Syrians displaced around the
world (41%), according to estimates based on data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR). More than
150,000 Syrians also live in North African countries like Egypt and Libya. The
number of Syrians living in these countries surged in 2014, from 500,000 to 2.5
million, largely due to a sharp increase in Syrian refugees to Jordan and
Lebanon. Turkey also experienced a large increase in both 2014 (from about 560,000
at the start of the year to 1.6 million at the end) and 2015 (from 1.6 million
to 2.5 million by year’s end).
About 1 million displaced Syrians have moved to Europe as asylum seekers
or refugees since the conflict began, according to asylum seeker data
from Eurostat, Europe’s statistical agency, and UNHCR
data on refugee
resettlement. More than 500,000 Syrians moved to Germany and applied for asylum
between 2011 and 2017, making it the fifth-largest displaced Syrian population
in the world. Smaller numbers of Syrian asylum seekers moved to Sweden (more
than 110,000) and Austria (nearly 50,000). Nearly all Syrian applicants who
applied for asylum in Europe in 2015 and 2016 either were approved to stay or
were waiting for a decision, according to Pew Research Center estimates.
In addition to asylum
seekers, an estimated 24,000 Syrians formally resettled as refugees in Europe
between 2011 and 2016. The applications of these refugees are processed and
approved before they
travel to their destination country. (Asylum seekers, by contrast, first move
to Europe and then have their applications processed once in their destination
country.)
About 100,000 displaced Syrians live outside Europe, Africa and the
Middle East, primarily in North America. These refugees represent less than 1% of
displaced Syrians worldwide. Since the start of the conflict, an estimated 52,000 Syrian refugees
have resettled in Canada and another 21,000 have resettled in the United
States, according to data from UNHCR, as well as government data from Canada and the United
States. (In
addition, several thousand Syrians have been granted asylum in the U.S. and Canada since 2012.)
In the U.S., about 8,000
Syrians have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) through a federal program that
provides some immigrants with time-limited permission to live and work in the
U.S. because of war or other catastrophes in their home countries. TPS protection for these Syrians is set to expire
on March 31; a decision on their future is expected by the end of January.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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