Istanbul home to 538,000 Syrians, highest number in Turkey
ANKARA – Anadolu Agency
Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, hosts the highest number of Syrian refugees in the country, according to official figures.
Turkey currently hosts around 3.4 million Syrian refugees, the highest number in the world, according to data from the Interior Ministry’s Migration Management Directorate.
Nearly 538,000 Syrians live in Istanbul, a metropolis with a total population of almost 15 million. Syrians therefore make up 3.63 percent of Istanbul’s total population, according to the directorate.
The southeastern province of Şanlıurfa hosts nearly 463,000 Syrians, while over 457,000 Syrians live in the Hatay province on the Turkey-Syria border.
Some 132,000 Syrians live in the southeastern border province of Kilis, while the city’s non-refugee population is about 131,000, making the number of registered Syrians higher than the city’s regular population.
The lowest number of Syrians, a mere 57, live in the Bayburt province in the Black Sea region.
According to the data, there are 3.42 million registered Syrian refugees in Turkey. Some 1.85 million of them are men and 1.57 million are women.
Some 2.46 million of the refugees are under 29 years old and there are over 515,000 children aged 4 and under.
Over 228,000 Syrians are living in 21 camps in 10 provinces of Turkey, according to the agency.
Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since 2011. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict, according to the U.N.
