Turkey warns next wave of Syrian refugees may end up in Europe

Many of them are fleeing war, repression and poverty in Africa and the Middle East. A large number are Syrians, some of whom try to cross the waters between Turkey and Greece.

“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation”, said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres in a statement. The United Nations statistics also show as many as 7.6 million people were internally displaced.

The number of Syrian refugees registered in neighboring countries has hit the 4 million mark, announced the UNHCR today.

“A “fate worse than death” is how some of the four million Syrian refugees now registered in countries neighboring Syria describe what it’s like to watch the towns and cities in which they left everything behind crumble under mortar attacks and barrel bombs, waiting endlessly for help that does not come while the humanitarian assistance on which they’ve relied is cut back”.

Turkey has seen much of the recent flow.

It has since claimed more than 230,000 lives, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

The more than 1.8 million Syrians in Turkey have made it the biggest host of refugees in the world, an expensive undertaking that the country is bearing mostly out of its own treasury.

“What are we going to be facing in another year’s time?” Andrew Harper, the UNHCR chief in Jordan, asked in an interview with The Associated Press. “What we think about from day-to-day is how to keep our children alive”, said Yassin al-Ali, a Syrian refugee living in northern Lebanon.

“No one in the world is working seriously to end the conflict so that we can go home”, said Ali, who fled his home in the central Homs province at the onset of the conflict that began in March 2011.

In the village Hashemite, near the Jordanian capital of Amman, refugee Nada Fareed said her husband had been out of work for about half a year and her family was getting deeper into debt.

“We don’t have any work, and we can’t leave the camp” for fear of arrest.

The dire situation is pushing a wave of Syrian refugees to escape to Western Europe, taking increasingly risky paths across the Mediterranean as European countries resist the flow of migrants and refugees.

“We have spent $6 billion so far”.