Afghanistan and Iraq drive up global refugee toll

School pupils look at a representation of a Darfur village supposedly destroyed during the war, in central London's Trafalgar Square, build by UNHCR as part of global commemorations of World Refugee Day.

17 June 2008

By Laura MacInnis

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan drove up the number of world refugees for a second straight year in 2007, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said there were 11.4 million refugees under its responsibility at the end of 2007, up from 9.9 million the year before.

"Much of the increase in refugees in 2007 was a result of the volatile situation in Iraq," the UNHCR said in a report, noting Iraqis and Afghans were nearly half the refugees under its care.

The number of people displaced by conflicts - including those uprooted in their own countries, who are not strictly defined as refugees - rose to 26 million from 24.4 million, the UNHCR said, citing 2007 figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

"We have now seen two years of increases, and that is a concern," said Antonio Guterres, head of the Geneva-based agency. Continued