Number fleeing war highest in a decade

Conflict forced nearly 12m to flee within their own country last year, monitors say

Conflict forced nearly 12 million people to flee within their own country last year, the highest level of such internal displacement in 10 years, international monitors said yesterday.

A total of 11.8 million people were uprooted from their homes and displaced internally in 2017 — nearly double the 6.9 million who suffered the same fate a year earlier, according to a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

This “is the highest number that we have recorded in a decade,” IDMC chief Alexandra Bilak told reporters in Geneva.

The newly displaced bring the total number of people living in internal displacement due to conflict close to 40 million worldwide, the study said.

“The staggering number of people forced to flee from their homes due to conflict and violence must serve as an eyeopener to us all,” NRC chief Jan Egeland said in a statement

The report found that 76 per cent of those newly displaced last year were concentrated in just 10 countries, with Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq alone accounting for more than half.

Syria for instance saw another

76% of those displaced in 2017 concentrated in just 10 countries

2.9m of those displaced were Syrians, many for a second or third time

2.9 million people displaced last year, many of them for a second or third time, bringing the total number of people internally displaced in the warravaged country to around 6.8 million.

Yemen, which previously topped the list, no longer figures even among the top-ten, but Bilak stressed that was due to lacking access and data and that the situation in the conflict-torn country remained dire.

Bilak warned that the total number of displaced people around the world could be far higher than calculated, pointing out that there was a lack of information about the destiny of some 8.5 million people who had been reported to have returned home or been relocated.

“We don’t have any credible information that might indicate that these people have returned to a sustainable situation,” she said.