More than 50 million people were forcibly uprooted worldwide at the end of last year, the highest level since after World War Two, as people fled crises from Syria to South Sudan, the U.N. refugee agency said on Friday. Half are children, many of them caught up in conflicts or persecution that world powers have been unable to prevent or end, UNHCR said in its annual Global Trends report. "We are really facing a quantum leap, an enormous increase of forced displacement in our world," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told a news briefing. The overall figure of 51.2 million displaced people soared by six million from a year earlier. They included 16.7 million refugees and 33.3 million displaced within their homelands, and 1.2 million asylum seekers whose applications were pending. Syrians fleeing the escalating conflict accounted for most of the world's 2.5 million new refugees last year, UNHCR said. In all, nearly 3 million Syrians have crossed into neighboring Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, while another 6.5 million remain displaced within Syria's borders. "We are seeing here the immense costs of not ending war, of failing to resolve or prevent conflict," Guterres said. "We see the Security Council paralyzed in many crucial crises around the world."
