20 percent of Syrian refugees live in Istanbul
ISTANBUL – Doğan News Agency
The Turkish province accommodating the highest number of Syrian refugees in the country is Istanbul with 20 percent, according to media monitoring company Ajans Press.
In figures that are based on data from the Interior Ministry’s Immigration Office, as well as media reports, as of June some 3.6 million Syrian refugees are hosted in Turkey.
Istanbul accommodates 561,159 Syrian refugees, marking the highest number, followed by the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa with 475,782 and the southern province of Hatay with 445,095.
Other provinces hosting a high number of Syrian refugees are the western provinces of Bursa and İzmir, the southeastern provinces of Gaziantep and Kilis, the Central Anatolian province of Konya, and the southern provinces of Adana and Mersin. The number of Syrians exceeds 100,000 in all of these provinces.
The registered number of Turks in Kilis, on the Turkey-Syria border north of Aleppo, stood at 136,319 as of last year, while the province hosts a total of 131,109 Syrian refugees. The demographic shift has sometimes led to confrontations between Turks and Syrians in the province.
276,158 Syrian babies born in last six years
The media monitoring company’s report also included the number of Syrian babies born in Turkey over the last six years, calculating it as reaching 276,158 based on figures from media outlets.
It also found that the issue of Syrian refugees was one of the most-discussed issues in Turkish media reports over the last six years.
The number of refugees has been on rise in Turkey since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011. The Syrian refugee population was 2.8 million in 2016 and 3.4 million in 2017.
Of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees, some 1.9 million are males and 1.7 million are females.
