Over 40 million people internally displaced in 2015: Aid group
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.
According to a report published by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) on Wednesday, 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 – where Saudi Arabia has been leading an intense air and ground offensive since late March 2015 to restore resigned president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to power.
More than 9,400 Yemenis, including 4,000 women and children, have lost their lives in the military campaign.
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 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.
"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 Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, who co-authored the report with the IDMC.
"We have to find ways to protect people from these horrendous forces of both nature and the man-made ones," Egeland added.
The IDMC also reported that natural disasters forced 19.2 million people out of their homes in 2015.
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