Jordan hosts 657,000 registered Syrian refugees

AMMAN — Out of some 4.9 million Syrians registered with the UNHCR in the region by mid March, around 657,000 are Syrian refugees hosted in Jordan, according to the Syria Regional Refugee Response's Inter-Agency Information Sharing Portal posted on UNHCR’s website.

The total number of Syrian refugees registered with UNHCR until mid March included 2 million in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, 2.9 million in Turkey and more than 29,000 in North Africa, according to UNHCR data.

Of the total, only 490,658, or 10 per cent, live in camps, while the rest live in urban, peri-urban and rural areas.

In Jordan, the data showed that 657,000 Syrian refugees are registered with the agency. Around 177,070 are in Amman, 158,585 in Mafraq, 108,826 in Zarqa and 135,535 in Irbid.

The UNHCR data indicated that there are 1.011 million Syrians registered with the agency in Lebanon.

In remarks to The Jordan Times, Minister of State for Media Affairs Mohammad Momani said there are around 1.3 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, representing almost 20 per cent of the country's population.

“We appreciate the international community’s support for Jordan and its efforts to help refugees and the host communities,” said Momani, who is also the government’s spokesperson, adding that of the total pledge, the aid delivered to Jordan last year reached around 60 per cent.

“By helping Jordan, the international community is actually investing in the stability of the region and the entire world as refugee crises are cross-national by definition,” he said.

“We stand on high moral ground when it comes to aiding refugees and we hope the international community helps us shoulder this international responsibility,” the minister added, highlighting the impact of hosting some 1.3 million Syrian refugees on several sectors in the country, whose public schools, for example, host around 180,000 Syrian children.

According to the UNHCR data, of the total number of registered Syrian refugees who live outside camps, around 49 per cent are aged between 18-59 years. Those aged between 5-11 years stand at about 19 per cent of the total registered Syrians.

UNHCR data indicated that the total Syrian asylum applications in Europe between April 2011 and October 2016 reached 884,461. Around 64 per cent of those were in Sweden and Germany and 22 per cent in Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and Bulgaria.

Of the total funding requirement for aid to refugees this year, which stands at about $4.6 billion, around $124 million or 3 per cent was received until mid March, the international agency said.