27m displaced by conflict and natural disasters in 2015

An aid agency has said 27.8m people around the world were internally displaced by conflicts and natural disasters last year, calling it a global crisis.

That’s as many as the combined populations of New York City, London, Paris, and Cairo — or an average of 66,000 people displaced every day in 2015.

A report by the Norwegian Refugee Council said 8.6m of last year’s internally displaced were uprooted by conflict, more than half of them in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

Yemen alone accounted for one quarter of conflict-related displacement, with 2.2m people uprooted, 20 times more than in 2014.

Yemen was followed by Syria with 1.3m displaced and Iraq with 1.1m.

The council’s Middle East director, Carsten Hansen, said while the world’s attention was focused on Middle Eastern refugees, or those who fled their homelands, millions were displaced internally in the region.

“While richer, stable countries have been scheming to keep asylum seekers out of their borders and deny them protection, millions remain trapped in their own countries with death... just around the corner,” he said.

The total of those internally displaced by conflict in the world now stands at 40.8m.