Over 2.5 million Syrians have fled Syria since the outbreak of civil war in March 2011. Another 4.25 million Syrians have been displaced within the country, making the total number of Syrians displaced over six million. “What is appalling is that the first million fled Syria in two years. The second million fled Syria in six months,” said António Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The United Nations has estimated that three-quarters of Syria’s 22.4 million people will require humanitarian aid in 2014.  The organization has asked for around thirteen billion dollars in aid. Around 2.3 billion dollars will go to Syrian civilians and another 4.2 billion will go to the Syrian refugees living abroad.

According to UNICEF, 39 percent of Syrian children have dropped out of school in the last academic year. Despite this, four out of five Syrians say food shortage is their biggest worry, as bread prices have risen by 500 percent. An interview with Samira, a Syrian refugee living in Lebanon, shed some light on the dire situation: “We need bread for the children; we don’t have any food at all. I plan to try to sell some items to get some money. None of us has eaten anything today…Our dignity prevents us from begging for food but this is a major problem that we are facing.”

The Turkish government houses 200,000 refugees in tent and trailer camps while 300,000 are said to be living within the country. This brings the total number of refugees in Turkey above 500,000. Jordan has the second largest number of Syrian refugees.

Zaatari is a Syrian refugee camp that opened in Jordan on July 28, 2012. By July 4, 2013, the camp was Jordan’s forth-largest city. Tents have been replaced with trailers, satellite dishes have been installed on the roofs, and hundreds of businesses are running. The camp even has three schools, two hospitals, and a maternity clinic. In Zaatari, bread, rice, bulgur, and lentils are free, and every two weeks everyone gets six dinars ($8.5) worth of food stamps. The camp is struggling to handle the ever-increasing amount of people. Riots have broken out in camps, as people have demanded better living conditions. Mariam, a resident at Zaatari said, “We can’t stand living here forever. With God’s will, we won’t stay here more than a year.” Another resident, the sixty-year-old, Khaled Zoabi said, “At the beginning, we counted (our exile) in months, then years, and now maybe decades.”

Meanwhile, Amnesty International has accused the European Union of failing to provide refugees a safe asylum. “The EU has miserably failed to play its part in providing a safe haven to the refugees who have lost all but their lives. The number of those it’s prepared to resettle is truly pitiful. Across the board, European leaders should hang their heads in shame,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
Only ten members of the European Union have offered to take in 12,000 refugees. According to Amnesty International, Italy and the United Kingdom haven’t offered any places at all.

Bevyn Manke ’14, clerk of Amnesty International at Wilmington Friends School, says,  “I believe that the most essential action that we can take in response to the Syrian refugee crisis is to educate ourselves regarding the historical developments that led Syria to its current state. In order to understand how to move forward in the best way possible, we must first understand what allowed the crisis to develop to such an extent. This was Amnesty’s goal in bringing Dr. Khan to speak to the upper school community, and I believe, that in this regard, we were successful.”