The Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, backed by his Russian and Iranian allies, are bombing and attacking the final rebel-controlled areas of Idlib and Aleppo provinces, creating hundreds of thousands of new refugees amassing on Turkey’s border. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the NATO-member nation with 80 million people, has vowed military action if the Syrian government forces don’t withdraw before the end of February.
More than 400,000 people have been killed and half of Syria’s population displaced since peaceful protests in 2011 turned into a civil war.
In 2018, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service’s Frontline program estimated 6.7 million Syrian refugees were living abroad. The top host countries are:
- Turkey – 3.6 million;
- Lebanon – 944,000;
- Jordan – 676,000;
- Germany – 532,000;
- Iraq – 253,000;
- Egypt – 133,000;
- Sweden – 109,000;
- Sudan – 94,000;
- Austria – 49,000;
- Netherlands – 32,000.
For more information on the current situation in Syria, here are some useful news sources in English:
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
For the Turkish government’s point of view:
