TAZA KHORMATO, Iraq (AP) — In a battered car loaded with
blankets and clothes, Hassan Abbas and his mother left a dusty town in
northern Iraq, fleeing this week’s violence and joining what the United
Nations says is the largest worldwide population of displaced people
since World War II.
The U.N. refugee agency’s latest annual
report, released Friday, found more than 50 million people worldwide
were displaced at the end of last year, reflecting an ever-expanding web
of international conflicts.
Last year’s increase in displaced
people was the largest in at least two decades, driven mainly by the
civil war in Syria, which has claimed an estimated 160,000 lives and
forced 9 million people to flee their homes. Now Iraq is adding to that
tide.
"I am going to sell this phone so we have money," Abbas said
at a checkpoint outside the town of Taza Khormato, near the city of
Kirkuk, where he will move in with relatives, and where 20 people will
share a single home.
He and his 50-year-old mother, Shukriya,
decided to leave the town after fighters from the al-Qaida breakaway
group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant shelled and burned down
the neighboring village of Basheer.
"My heart is sick. It’s sick.
From the fear, the shelling, the explosions," Shukriya said, sobbing.
"They say they killed children in Basheer. By God all we want is peace."
The
jihadi group swept across northern Iraq last week, seizing the city of
Mosul and carrying Syria’s brutal civil war across the border. Their
swift advance set the stage for a conflict that has already displaced
hundreds of thousands and could widen.
Iraqis who have fled over
the past week were not included in the U.N. High Commission for
Refugees’ annual global trends report. The Kurdish regional government
says at least 300,000 people have fled the latest violence.
The
agency found that at the end of last year, 51.2 million people had been
forced from their homes worldwide, including refugees, the internally
displaced and asylum-seekers. That was the highest figure since the U.N.
began collecting numbers in the early 1950s.
It’s also 6 million
more people than at the end of the previous year, reflecting a failure
to resolve longstanding conflicts or prevent the eruption of new ones,
the head of the U.N. refugee agency said in announcing the report.
"The
world has shown a limited capacity to prevent conflicts and to find a
timely solution for them," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio
Guterres said.
"Today, we not only have an absence of a global
governance system, but we have sort of an unclear sense of power in the
world," Guterres told reporters in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, where
the report was released.
By the end of last year, 2.5 million
Syrians had become refugees in neighboring countries and more than 6.5
million had been displaced within Syria, the U.N. refugee agency said.
Also
contributing to the figures are conflicts and persecution in other
countries, including the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
"These numbers represent a quantum leap in forced displacement around the world," Guterres
said.
Aid
agencies have struggled to keep pace. On Friday, the World Food
Program, another U.N. agency, said it was forced to cut rations to
refugees in several countries.
"We are being squeezed. Other U.N.
agencies are increasingly squeezed," along with humanitarian aid groups,
spokesman Peter Smerdon told The Associated Press.
"This means
that ultimately the poor, the most vulnerable, the innocent civilians
who have escaped conflicts with their lives and reached refuge in a
country which is at peace, they will suffer because their assistance
cannot be delivered."
The data were compiled using records from governments, non-government partner organizations and the
UNHCR.
Of
51.2 million displaced people worldwide last year, 16.7 million were
refugees outside their countries’ borders. More than half of the
refugees under UNHCR’s care — 6.3 million — had been in exile for more
than five years, the agency said.
By country, the biggest refugee populations were Afghan, Syrian and Somali, the report said.
The
countries hosting the largest number of refugees were Pakistan, Iran
and Lebanon, which is bitterly divided over the war in neighboring Syria
and has seen several deadly attacks linked to the conflict.
More
than a million Syrians have registered in Lebanon as refugees since the
conflict in their country started in March 2011. The refugees now make
up nearly one fourth of Lebanon’s population of 4.5 million.
Many
of the displaced people have left behind ghost towns where fighters
haunt empty streets. Inside Taza Khormato, shops were shuttered and
houses closed up. In one home, a group of men aged 15 to 50 gathered
assault rifles and rocket launchers.
"There are no families here
anymore, only the men," said Adel Fadel, a 60-year-old farmer with
broken teeth. "We sent them away, because we were afraid" the Islamic
State would attack.
___
Krauss reported from Cairo.
Associated Press writers Barbara Surk in Beirut and John Heilprin in
Geneva contributed to this report.