Muhammad Hamed / Reuters
A Syrian refugee woman sits with her children during a visit by U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres and Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh to the Al Zaatri refugee camp in the Jordanian city of Mafraq September 11, 2012.
Continued violence in civil war torn Syria could lead to as many as 700,000 Syrians fleeing to neighboring countries by the end of the year, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said Thursday.
There are now 303,000 Syrian refugees living in neighboring countries, such as Jordan and Turkey, who have registered with the U.N. or are awaiting registration, a UNHCR spokeswoman told Lean Forward. The figure does not include Syrians displaced within their own country by the violence or migrant Syrian workers in neighboring countries.
As many as 3,000 are crossing over the border each day, the organization said. Half of that population lives in refugee camps.
Women and children comprise 75% of the refugee population, according to the U.N.
The organization warned of the growing humanitarian crisis in a donation appeal it issued with partners such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme. The groups said they will need nearly $500 million to address the crisis, especially with winter approaching and the number of refugees continuing to escalate.
Food, education, and health care are priorities in the organizations' response plan, according to the appeal.
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Our policy towards Syria needs more definition after the election. We also need to make sure that we get plenty of aid to the refugees in Jordan and Turkey. The Assad regime will hang on for dear life because they have no where to go. However, there will come a time when Assad will either be pushed out or he will face capture and certain death. No military can indefinitely keep supporting a repressive government that is routinely massacring its own people. Soldiers come from families that are being oppressed and eventually many of them will simply desert or join the rebels.
The Bashar Assad regime is nasty and vile. What comes after Bashar Assad for Syria? Continued civil war, massacres, anarchy, violence or terrorism are all real possibilities for a post-Assad Syria. The real problems are the complex relations between the many tribes and different groups of people in Syria. The situation on the ground in Syria is complex. Its difficult for a non-specialist to even to begin to describe Syria's society of many tribes and groups of ethnic peoples trying to live in once society under one government. It is even more perilous to try to predict how these tribes/ethnic groups will all will get along together in the future.
The sad truth is that dictatorships and autocracies with strong men leaders with huge security forces arise in these developing countries for a reason. Ruling with an iron fist is brutal and nasty but the internecine warfare between different groups within these countries often kills off more people than the iron fist of a strong man's security forces. Sure Bashar Assad is nasty but what could come afterwards scares the hell out of me. This is why we need to get the hell off of imported OPEC oil immediately because our involvement in the Middle East only makes things demonstrably worse for everyone in the whole region. Will the people of post-Assad Syria vote with ballots to build things up or with bullets and bombs or chemical weapons to tear things down? I don't know and neither does anyone else.