 in tent cities, set up in the Yayladağı
districts of Hatay Province
, near Turkey's border with Syria. By the end of the month, 5,000 of the refugees had returned to Syria. By late June 2011, The number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon had reached around 10,000 people. By mid July 2011, the first Syrian refugees found sanctuary in Jordan, with numbers reaching 1,500 by December.
In the April 2012 offensive by the Syrian Army, which preceded the expected ceasefire on 10 April of the Kofi Annan peace plan, the flow of refugees into Turkey reached a peak, with as many as 2,300 refugees entering on 4 April and 2,800 refugees entering on 5 April. The number of Syrian refugees in Turkey reached 23,835 by 6 April. In Ankara, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu demanded Assad keep his promise to cease military operations, while demanding action by the international community and the UN if more refugees came.
By 3 May, the number of Syrians, crossing the Turkish border was estimated at 300 people. Turkish President, Abdullah Gül
, said that Turkey had prepared for "a worst-case scenario", in an apparent reference to a possible influx of large numbers of refugees from Syria. He also referred to the fact that Turkey had already set up a small camp in southern Hatay Province
for 263 Syrians who had fled their country on 29 April .
By mid May, some 700 of Tel Kalakh residents had fled across the border, to the northern Lebanese village of Mkaybleh. According to Sheikh Abdullah, a prominent religious figure in the village of Wadi Khaled in northern Lebanon, by mid May the village had received more than 1,350 refugees from Syria over a period of 10 days, most of them women and children. More were expected to arrive.
On 14 May, Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said that the refugee flow into Lebanon had been fairly small at around 1,000 people. She also said the number of Syrians who had crossed the border into Turkey was also small at about 250.
With the siege of Jisr al-Shughour, the situation on the Turkish-Syrian border deteriorated, as Jisr al-Shughour, home to 41,000 people, became largely an abandoned town, in expectation of a Syrian Army attack. Initially The Guardian reported that officials in southern Turkey said that about 2,500 Syrians, many from Jisr al-Shughour, had crossed the border. However, the number of refugees, housed in refugee camps across the Turkish-Syrian border exceeded 10,000 people by mid June according to other sources.
By mid June, the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon was estimated by human rights associations at 8,500, with the main concentrations in the Akkar and Tripoli areas, and the total number of Syrian refugees in all surrounding countries surpassing more than 20,000 people. As Syrian troops amassed by the Turkish border, the flow rate further increased by hundreds of refugees a day by 23 June, reaching a total of 11,700 Syrian citizens, housed in refugee camps across the Turkish border.
According to official numbers by early July, 15,228 Syrians had sought refuge in Turkey, as a result of tension caused by the Syrian Civil War and a crackdown on protests by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's administration. More than 5,000 of them had returned on their own to Syria, therefore leaving around 10,227 Syrian refugees in Turkey.
The number of registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon reached 2,600 by the end of August, with thousands more residing in Lebanon illegally. According to UNHCR, some 120 Syrian refugees crossed into Lebanon on 29 August. According to Al-Arabiya, some 2,500 Syrians resided in the Wadi Khaled area, down from 5,500 Syrians who were there in May. Most of the Syrian refugees in the area were Arabs and Bedouins. A humanitarian aid campaign was launched by "Baitulmaal" nicknamed the "Syrian Refugee Relief".
By September, the estimates for Syrian refugees in Lebanon rose to around 4,000 registered, with possibly as many as 6,000 in total residing there. Despite the return of many Syrians back to Syria between July and August, in e