World not facing up to Iraqi refugee crisis: Amnesty

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LONDON, Sept 24 (AFP): The international community has not faced up to the scale of the Iraqi refugee crisis, leaving Syria and Jordan to deal with the exodus, Amnesty International said in a report published Monday.
The London-based human-rights group described the vast numbers of Iraqi refugees as the world's "fastest growing displacement crisis."
According to Amnesty's estimates, there are about 4.2 million displaced Iraqis, 2.2 million of whom are within Iraq, with the vast majority of the rest in Syria and Jordan.
The exodus is the biggest population movement in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in 1948 and Palestinians displaced, Amnesty said.
"The desperate humanitarian situation of displaced Iraqis, including the refugees and those who remain within Iraq, has been largely ignored by the world," said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa programme.
Some 1.4 million displaced Iraqis are in Syria, with a further 500,000 in Jordan, with both countries, absent of any meaningful international support, struggling to deal with the massive influx and considering closing off their borders, thereby cutting off the principal means of leaving war-torn Iraq.
According to Amnesty, those numbers increase by an average of 2,000 people a day.