Today's Article - 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis

This article is for quizzes on Monday December 28th..

More than four million refugees of the Syrian Civil War have left the country during the course of the war. Most of them fled to neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, while thousands also ended up in more distant countries of the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf, North Africa and Europe. As of December 2015, Turkey was the world's biggest refugee hosting country with close to 2.5 million Syrian refugees; the nation had spent more than 8 billion Euros since 2011 on direct assistance to them according to estimates by Turkish Ministry of Education deputy secretary Yusuf Büyük.

The refugee crisis began in 2011, when thousands of Syrian citizens fled across the border to neighboring Turkey and Lebanon. By early July 2011, 15,000 Syrian citizens had taken shelter in tent cities, set up in the Yayladağı, Reyhanlı and Altınözü districts of Hatay Province, near Turkey's border with Syria. By the end of that month, 5,000 of the refugees had returned to Syria. However, by late June 2011, the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon had reached around 10,000 people. By mid-July 2011, the first Syrian refugees found sanctuary in Jordan, with their numbers reaching 1,500 by December. On 21 September the European Union approved a plan committing itself to taking in 120,000 refugees. The newly elected Liberal Government announced that it would bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada by the end of 2015 and struck a cabinet sub-committee chaired by the Minister of Health, Jane Philpott, to fast track their resettlement.

 In 2015, fake Syrian passports were being used by non-Syrians in the hopes of fraudulently gaining legal residency in Europe. According to the EU border agency, Frontex, trafficking in fake Syrian passports increased. In September 2015 German customs officers seized packages containing Syrian passports which police suspect were being sold illegally to those wishing to gain entry to the country.