Number of Syrian refugees passes five million: UN

Syria’s devastating civil war, now in its seventh year, has rendered more than half the country’s population refugees. The conflict has left more than 320,000 people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. (AFP)
Updated 30 March 2017
Follow

Number of Syrian refugees passes five million: UN

GENEVA: The number of refugees who have fled the devastating conflict in Syria has passed five million, the United Nations said Thursday.
“As the number of men, women and children fleeing six years of war in Syria passes the five million mark, the international community needs to do more to help them,” the UN refugee agency said in a statement.


Take back and prosecute your jailed Daesh militants, Iraq tells Europe

Updated 24 January 2026
Follow

Take back and prosecute your jailed Daesh militants, Iraq tells Europe

RAQQA: Baghdad on Friday urged European states to repatriate and prosecute their citizens who fought for Daesh, and who are now being moved to Iraq from detention camps in Syria.

Europeans were among 150 Daesh prisoners transferred so far by the US military from Kurdish custody in Syria. They were among an estimated 7,000 militants due to be moved across the border to Iraq as the Kurdish-led force that has held them for years relinquishes swaths of territory to the advancing Syrian army.
In a telephone call on Friday with French President Emmanuel Macron, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani said European countries should take back and prosecute their nationals.
An Iraqi security official said the 150 so far transferred to Iraq were “all leaders of the Daesh group, and some of the most notorious criminals.” They included “Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Iraqis,” he said.
Another Iraqi security source said the group comprised “85 Iraqis and 65 others of various nationalities, including Europeans, Sudanese, Somalis, and people from the Caucasus region.”
They all took part in Daesh operations in Iraq, he said, and were now being held at a prison in Baghdad.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that “non-Iraqi terrorists will be in Iraq temporarily.”
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces jailed thousands of militant fighters and detained tens of thousands of their relatives in camps as it pushed out Daesh in 2019 after five years of fighting.