Forced to Flee

The total number of people internally displaced by wars and conflicts around the world reached 40.8 million by the end of 2015, says an international aid group.  The report noted that the number of people forced from their homes within their own borders was twice as many as those who were forced to cross international borders and become refugees and asylum seekers. Natural disasters forced 19.2 million people out of their homes in 2015.

According to a report published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC), 8.6 million of them were uprooted from their homes within their own countries last year. The IDMC noted that the figure boils down to a daily average of 24,000 people, over half of whom in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq.

Around 2.2 million of those displaced were in Yemen -- eight percent of its total population.

Apart from the Middle East, the countries with the highest numbers of displaced people were Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Ukraine.

"The world is in a tremendous displacement crisis that is relentlessly building year after year, and now too many places have the perfect storm of conflict and/or disasters," said the head of the NorwegianRefugee Council, Jan Egeland. "We have to find ways to protect people from these horrendous forces of both nature and the man-made ones."