Turkey tops UNHCR’s refugee hosting list with 2.9 million refugees

ANKARA - Anadolu Agency

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Turkey tops the list of refugee hosting countries in the world, hosting 2.9 million of the world’s 65 million refugees, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stated on June 20.

Most of the refugees hosted by Turkey are from Syria and Iraq, with the UNHCR putting the number of Iraqi refugees in Turkey at around 30,000. 

Turkey is followed in the list by Pakistan, which hosts 1.4 million refugees, and Lebanon, which hosts a million refugees.

Over the past two decades, the global population of forcibly displaced people has doubled from 33.9 million in 1997 to 65.6 million in 2016, the UNHCR’s latest Global Trends report on displacement stated.

Twenty people are displaced every minute of the day, the report added.

Turkey hosts 54 percent of the Syrian refugees. There are approximately 2,969,000 documented Syrians in Turkey, of which 1,376,000 are women and 1,351,000 are children, according to the Interior Ministry.

When the undocumented migrants are added to this figure, it is estimated that the number exceeds 3 million.

The refugees mostly live in eastern and southeastern Turkey, with Kilis, Gaziantep, Hatay, Şanlıurfa, Mardin and Adana being the provinces sheltering the largest number of Syrian refugees. The country’s largest metropolitan cities like İzmir and Istanbul also host a large proportion of Syrians.

Only eight percent of Syrian refugees live in the designated 26 camps across Turkey. The rest have moved to cities where they eke out a living doing odd jobs.

The UNCHR has spent seven percent of its $6.1 billion budget to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees in Turkey.