Refugees of the Syrian civil war
Refugees of the Syrian civil war are citizens and permanent residents of Syria who fled the country in the course of the Syrian civil war. The pre-war population of Syria was estimated at 22 million, including permanent residents. Of that number, the United Nations identified 13.5 million as displaced persons in need of humanitarian assistance. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011 more than six million were internally displaced, and around five million crossed into other countries, seeking asylum or placement in Syrian refugee camps. It is believed to be one of the world's largest refugee crises.
Armed revolts started across Syria in 2011 when security forces launched a violent campaign to halt nation-wide protests. This led to the establishment of resistance militias and the outbreak of a civil war. Assaults on civilian areas by the Syrian Armed Forces resulted in the forced displacement of millions of Syrians and a full-blown refugee crisis. The Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan was established in 2015 as a coordination platform including neighboring countries except Israel. By 2016, various nations had made pledges to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to permanently resettle 170,000 registered refugees. Syrian refugees have contributed to the European migrant crisis, with the UNHCR receiving almost one million asylum applicants in Europe by August 2017. Turkey was the largest host country of registered refugees, with 3.6 million Syrian refugees in 2019, 3.3 million in 2023, and almost 3 million at the time of the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024.
As of December 2022, a minimum of 580,000 people were estimated to be dead; with 13 million Syrians being displaced and 6.7 million refugees forced to flee Syria. The Ba'athist government and its security apparatus have arrested and tortured numerous repatriated refugees, subjecting them to forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. Around 12 million Syrians live under conditions of severe food insecurity. More than two-thirds of the displaced are women and children.
The Law No. 10 issued by Bashar al-Assad in 2018 enabled the state to confiscate properties from displaced Syrians and refugees, and has made the return of refugees harder for fear of being targeted by the regime. Humanitarian aid to internally displaced persons within Syria and Syrian refugees in neighboring countries is planned largely through the UNHCR office. UNHCR Filippo Grandi has described the Syrian refugee crisis as "the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time and a continuing cause for suffering."
Statistics
Over 13.4 million Syrians had been forcibly displaced by October 2025. At least 6.7 million of them have left the country, with the rest moving within Syria.The Eurostat/UN Expert Group on Refugee and Internally Displaced Persons Statistics considers three distinct main categories of people of concern:
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees curates a database of estimated number of Syrian refugees and asylum seekers per country. These numbers are gathered from local governments, but do not include former refugees that have been resettled. The total number of refugees that a country has received may therefore be higher, if a country has accepted or rejected refugees. The data below is gathered from the UNHCR Refugee Data Finder, and supplemented with several additional sources.
Persons in need of international protection, over time, per receiving country
The graph below shows how many Syrian refugees and asylum seekers have been present outside Syria over time, as registered by the UNHCR. Note that this does not include people from the moment they are resettled, unregistered refugees, and illegal immigrants.Includes refugees and people in refugee-like situations. Last updated mid-2025. Countries below 100,000 Syrians have been grouped in 'Other countries'.
Total displacement of Syrians per country
An approach to include not just current refugees but also the former refugees that have resettled, is to consider the immigration per country. Depending on local census frequency and inclusion criteria, these numbers may be more or less approximate. The net immigration is the difference in citizens from Syria between 2011 and the time of data collection. As such it does not include people who returned to Syria. Neither UNHCR nor immigration data include illegal immigrants.History
Background
under the rule of the Ba'ath Party are considered to be in exceptionally poor conditions by international observers and have been deteriorating further since 2008. The 2010–11 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen inspired major protests in Syria. The Syrian Army intervened in March 2011, and the Syrian government crackdown gradually increased in violence, escalating to major military operations to suppress resistance. In April, hundreds died in clashes between the Syrian Army and opposition forces, which included armed protestors and defected soldiers. As Syria descended into civil war, it quickly became divided into a complex patchwork of shifting alliances and territories between the Assad government, rebel groups, the SDF, and Salafi jihadist groups. Over half a million people died in the war, including around two hundred thousand civilians.By May 2011, thousands of people had fled from the war to neighbouring countries, with even larger numbers displaced within Syria itself. As armies assaulted various locations and battled, entire villages were trying to escape, with thousands of refugees a day crossing borders. Other reasons for displacement in the region, often adding to the Syrian Civil War, target the refugees of the Iraqi civil war, Kurdish refugees, and Palestinian refugees.
"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 António Guterres said in 2014. The UNHCR reported that the total number of refugees worldwide exceeds 50 million for the first time since World War II, largely due to the Syrian civil war.
Development
The number of refugees that crossed the Turkish border reached 10,000–15,000 by mid 2011. More than 5,000 returned to Syria between July and August, while most were moved to newly built camps that hosted 7,600 refugees by November. By the end of 2011, the number of refugees were estimated to be 5,500–8,500 in Lebanon, with around 2,500 registered, around 1,500 registered in Jordan, and thousands had found shelter in Libya.By April 2012, in the early insurgency phase of the Syrian civil war preceding 10 April ceasefire under the Kofi Annan peace plan, UN reported 200,000 or more Syrians internally displaced, 55,000 registered refugees and an estimated 20,000 not yet registered. 25,000 were registered in Turkey, 10,000 in Lebanon, 7,000 in Jordan, 800 in Iraq. Within Syria, there were 100,000 refugees from Iraq, 70,000 more already returned to Iraq.
In mid 2012, when the peace plan failed and the UN for the first time officially proclaimed Syria to be in a state of civil war, the number of registered refugees increased to more than 110,000. Over 2 days in July, 19,000 Syrians fled from Damascus into Lebanon, as violence inside the city escalated. The first Syrian refugees migrated by sea to the European Union, small numbers found asylum in various countries such as Colombia. Some refugees were turned away from Jordan. By the end of 2012, the UNHCR reported that the number of refugees jumped to well over 750,000 with 135,519 in Turkey; 54,000 in Iraqi Kurdistan and about 9,000 in the rest of Iraq; 150,000 in Lebanon 142,000 in Jordan and over 150,000 in Egypt
An estimated 1.5 million Syrians are refugees by the end of 2013. In 2014, the deteriorating humanitarian situation in neighboring Iraq prompted an influx of Iraqi refugees into north-eastern Syria. By the end of August, the UN estimated 6.5 million people had been displaced within Syria, while more than 3 million had fled to countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
With the beginning of 2015, the European Union struggled to cope with the migrant crisis, its countries entering negotiations and heated political debate over closing or reinforcing borders and quota systems for resettlement of refugees and migrants from different parts of the world. The image of a drowned Syrian toddler's body washed up on a Turkish beach became a seminal moment in the refugee crises and global response. National debates and media coverage about the Syrian refugee crises increase markedly, bringing considerable attention to the human costs of the Syrian Civil War, the responsibilities of host countries, pressures forcing refugees to migrate from their host countries, people smuggling, and the responsibilities of third countries to resettle refugees.
In the same year in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan was launched to better coordinate humanitarian help between UNHCR, governments and NGOs. In 2016, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey negotiated multi-year agreements with international donors that provided material support, namely the Jordan Compact, the Lebanon Compact, and the EU-Turkey Statement, respectively. The countries hosting the largest numbers of refugees also introduced a number of restrictions on new arrivals. Lebanon stopped new registrations and allows refugees to enter the country only in extreme circumstances. Jordan sealed its border with Syria during most of 2016, because of security concerns over ISIL control, according to government officials. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International criticized Jordanian authorities for not allowing refugees in and suspending aid to the informal encampents reported on the border. Reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International emerged in 2016 that Turkish border guards routinely shoot at Syrian refugees trying to reach Turkey, also, Turkey has forcibly returned thousands of Syrian refugees to war zone since mid-January 2016. The Turkish Foreign Ministry and President Erdoğan denied it.
In 2017, while the conflict in Syria and the reasons for displacement continue, few Syrians are able to leave it, due to more restrictive border management by neighboring countries. In the first half of 2017, an estimated 11 million displacements were recorded and around 250,000 more refugees have been registered in neighboring countries, however it is hard to estimate how many of them crossed the border recently. In the same period, an estimated 50,000 first time asylum applications have been made by Syrians in Europe, and around 100,000 new third country resettlements are planned for 2017. The outcome of the Civil war in Syria, that saw the overthrow of the Assad regime, caused many countries to reevaluate their policy regarding Syrian refugees, at least until the situation in Syria is clarified.