Syrian Refugees: Challenges to Host Countries and the International Community

The scale of refugee movements from Syria has been both rapid and massive. A full year after the first disturbances in Syria, the number of registered Syrian refugees in the neighboring countries was just over 26,000.¹ Nearly four years later, as of end-December 2015, this total was just under 4.6 million.² None of the host governments expected the displacement either to reach such a scale or to last this long. The initial displacement occurred against the optimistic background of the early days of the Arab Spring and thus under the assumption that any displacement caused by popular uprisings in Syria