The plight of Syrians displaced by civil war grew worse in 2016 as the fighting in that country continued with no significant hope on the horizon for peace. As the year is drawing to a close, the stop and restart of the evacuation of civilians from the city of Aleppo this past weekend has best reflected the international community’s inability to end the fighting.
The human and economic costs of Syria’s civil war will take years to tally, but early estimates suggest staggering tolls in Syria and in other countries. Earlier this year, The Associated Press collected a variety of estimates of the toll of the civil war. The estimates of the number of dead vary from 250,000 to 470,000. More than a million people have been injured.
A World Bank estimate at the beginning of this year estimated the damage in six Syrian cities to be as much as $4.5 billion, the AP reported. Additionally, nearly all of the country’s UNESCO World Heritage sites have been either badly damaged or destroyed.
The fighting has taken an economic toll on Syria and surrounding countries, although accurate appraisals of the fighting’s economic costs on Syria are unavailable. A nearly year-old report by the World Vision charity and Frontier Economics consulting organization stated that the fighting at the time had cost the country $275 billion in lost economic growth opportunities.
Nearly six years of fighting has also sent millions of Syrians from their homes and into refugee camps and resettlement programs scattered around the world in dozens of countries. More than 11 million Syrians — nearly half of the country’s population — have been displaced either within the country or to other nations, according to the AP.
More than 4.8 million Syrians have fled their homeland and are living in other countries, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency. Turkey hosts more than 2.5 million Syrians, more than any other nation. In Europe, Germany hosts more than 450,000 Syrian refugees, the greatest number on that continent.
[ Turkey struggles to educate Syrian refugees]
Lebanon, Syria’s small coastal neighbor to the west, hosts the greatest number of Syrian refugees as a proportion to its native population, according to the UNHCR. For every 1,000 residents of Lebanon, roughly 182 Syrian refugees were in the country by the end of 2015, according to the UNHCR.
The costs of Syria’s civil war reverberate around the world. In Jordan, for example, the decision to accept more than 600,000 Syrian refugees has cost the country more than $2.5 billion annually, according to one estimate by the World Bank. Lebanon’s economy has been stretched to a near breaking point by accommodating more than 1 million Syrian refugees.
The chart below shows the countries that are hosting the greatest number of Syrian refugees in proportion to their own population, according to the UNHCR.
| Countries With the Most Refugees Per Capita (source: UNHCR) | Syrian Refugees Per 1,000 People at End of 2015 | Total Syrian Refugees at End of 2015 |
| Lebanon | 182 | 1,062,690 |
| Jordan | 83 | 628,223 |
| Turkey | 32 | 2,503,549 |
| Iraq | 7 | 244,642 |
| Armenia | 6 | 16,611 |
| Sweden | 5 | 52,707 |
| Malta | 3 | 1,328 |
| Cyprus | 3 | 3,110 |
| Denmark | 2 | 12,988 |
| Bulgaria | 2 | 13,819 |
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Countries Hosting the Highest Proportion of Syrian Refugees originally appeared on usnews.com
