efugees in Turkey reached 135,519 registered; 8,852 in Iraq proper and additional 54,000 in Iraqi Kurdistan; 109,081 registered in Lebanon, with 41,712 people awaiting registration; 100,368 registered in Jordan, with 41,524 Syrians awaiting registration. There are also 12,915 people registered in Egypt as of 30 December 2012, and about at least 150,000 residing in the country.
There were increased concerns over fears of the exploitation of women refugees in particular.
Some Orthodox Christian refugees from Syria began to arrive in the United States of America, according to the website of the Antiochian Archdiocese.
In August, Bulgaria started to experience enormous influx of illegal Syrian refugees. Bulgaria asked the European Union and Red Cross for aid in handling an increase in Syrian refugees. Bulgaria, which shares a border with Turkey, may have to provide shelter for as many as 10,000 Syrians by year end. Bulgarian refugee centers are full and the government is looking for additional locations to accommodate a rise in people illegally crossing the border with Turkey.
In August, the United Nations confirmed that groups of thousands of Syrian refugees left their country into Iraqi Kurdistan.
In September, Italy also experienced increases in Syrian refugees. The majority Syrian refugees have come from Egypt, although some started their journeys from Turkey. UNHCR estimates that more than 4,600 Syrians have arrived in Italy by sea since the beginning of 2013. About two-thirds of these arrivals were in August.
In September, Swedish migration authorities ruled that all Syrian asylum seekers will be granted permanent residency in light of the worsening conflict in Syria. Sweden is the first EU-country to make this offer. The decision means that the roughly 8,000 Syrians who have temporary residency in Sweden will now be able to stay in the country permanently. They will also have the right to bring their families to Sweden. While Malek Laesker, vice-chair of the Syrian Arabian Cultural Association of Sweden, welcomed the decision, he also warned it could create problems. "The fact that Sweden is the first country to open its arms is both positive and negative," he told the TT news agency, explaining that it may be a boon for the growing people-smuggling market.
In September, the countries in South America (mainly Argentina and Brazil) decided to offer refuge to thousands of displaced Syrians. More than three hundred Syrian refugee families have already arrived in Argentina. Moreover, Brazil is the first country in the Americas region to offer humanitarian visas to Syrian refugees. Brazil's embassies in (Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq) countries neighbouring Syria will be responsible for issuing travel visas for people wanting to go there. Claims for asylum will need to be presented on arrival in Brazil. These special humanitarian visas will also be provided to family members living in countries neighbouring Syria.
By the end of August 2014, the UN estimated 6.5 million people had been displaced in Syria, while more than 3 million refugees had fled to countries such as Lebanon (1.14 million), Jordan (608,000) and Turkey (815,000). Another 35,000 refugees were awaiting registration, while estimates of several hundred thousand more were not included in official figures as they were unregistered. "The Syria crisis has become the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era, yet the world is failing to meet the needs of refugees and the countries hosting them," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres
said at the time.
Turkey's Killis camp was featured in a Feb. 13 article in the New York Times titled How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp. It is run by Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, or AFAD, and staffed by Turkish government employees, rather than by NGOs. It is hoped that the 14,000 refugees benefiting from the clean, well organized facility will eventually "go home and become grand ambassadors of Turkey."
The UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) reported in 2014 that the total number of r