More than three million Syrians have fled the civil war ravaging their country to become refugees — a million of them in the past year alone, the United Nations said earlier today.
“Syria´s intensifying refugee crisis will today surpass a record three million people,” the UN´s refugee agency said in a statement, adding that the number did not include hundreds of thousands of others who fled without registering as refugees.
Less than a year ago, the number of registered Syrian refugees stood at two million, UNHCR said, pointing to reports of “increasingly horrifying conditions inside the country” to explain the surge.
It described “cities where populations are surrounded, people are going hungry and civilians are being targeted and indiscriminately killed.”
The increasingly fragmented conflict raging in Syria has claimed more than 191,000 lives since erupting in March 2011.
