Iraq's 2.3 million and Afghanistan's 3.1 million refugees account for nearly half of the world's 11.4 million refugees under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees , while a further 4.6 Palestinian refugees are cared for under the separate mandate of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

One in eight Iraqis is now either internally displaced or a refugee, with Jordan and Syria 'home' to the largest number of Iraqis. Syria hosts about 1.5 million refugees .

Some 52,000 Iraqis applied to the UNHCR for refugee status in 2007 alone, representing the largest group of applicants globally .

Jordan is haven to about 500,000 Iraqis , which is 8 percent of that nation's total population. The burden on the country is onerous. If hosted by the United States, the proportionate number of refugees in terms of hosting population would be more than 24 million.

Lamees*, 8, and her family live in the Jordanian capital of Amman.

Each day she fears either herself or her father will be killed, having heard many stories of Iraqis being killed in their homeland. Stories of kidnappings and ransom requests, home invasions, beatings, suicide bombings, death threats, and the murder of loved ones are also common.

Lamees is one of the luckier of the 200,000 Iraqi refugee children in Jordan because she is able to attend school. Currently less than 15 per cent of school age refugee children are accessing education.

The only way she could get an education was to enrol in a private school, which her family struggles to afford. Many Iraqi refugees have been out of the education system for five years or have had interrupted schooling since fleeing Iraq.

In some public schools, children face overcrowded classrooms, poorly maintained buildings and facilities. Harassment of Iraqi refugee children by students and in some cases, teachers, has been identified in assessments completed by humanitarian agencies like World Vision.

Not surprisingly, more than 30 per cent of Iraqi refugee children surveyed by World Vision in Jordan indicated they had no hope for the future.

Um Mohammed* from Marka, another outlying area of Amman, tells how being without work or school or assurance for a better future is impacting her three sons and daughter.

"My older boys' behaviour changed from that in Iraq. Here they cannot work. They have no individual freedom and they feel like they are being chased all the time. They became more aggressive and yell all the time. They say it would be better if you left us to die in Iraq than bringing us to live here," said Um Mohammed.

Chronic bedwetting, sleeplessness or regular nightmares plague many children interviewed by World Vision. Others expressed a fear of being separated from their family, suffered regular panic attacks, or were having difficulty concentrating. In more extreme cases children suffer from eating disorders and stunted growth.

Unable to work due to their unclear legal status, parents are struggling to provide for the basic needs of their children, let alone address their urgent psychosocial needs.

Education and psychosocial support are the current focus of World Vision's work. Since early 2007, World Vision has been supporting the work of local and international organisations providing relief assistance to refugees, including supplementary feeding, healthcare, informal education and psychosocial activities for children through child-focused community centres.

World Vision aims to assist some 18,000 people in its current program, including 15,000 Iraqi refugees and 3,000 people from other vulnerable communities in Jordan.

'Refugee Children of a Shattered East', a multimedia presentation featuring the 'invisible' refugee children of Central Asia and the Middle East can be viewed at: http://meero.worldvision.org/refugeechildren/RefugeeChildren.html

-Ends-

NOTES:

*Identities have been changed to protect interviewees. Many Iraqis fled after receiving death threats. Many Iraqis have overstayed visa permits (due to inability to pay and fear of being identified).

Definition of a refugee: The 1951 Refugee Convention describes a refugee as a person who 'owing to a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of particular social group or political opinion, is outside their country of nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.'

Definition of an asylum seeker: Someone who has made a claim that he or she is a refugee, and is waiting for that claim to be accepted or rejected.

Definition of Palestinian refugee: Under United Nations Relief & Works Agency's operational definition, Palestine refugees are persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. UNRWA's services are available to all those living in its area of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. UNRWA's definition of a refugee also covers the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. The number of registered Palestine refugees has subsequently grown from 914,000 in 1950 to more than 4.4 million in 2005, and continues to rise due to natural population growth.

Sources:

• Protecting Refugees & the role of the UNHCR– source: www.unhcr.org]
  
• http://www.unhcr.org/statistics/STATISTICS/4852366f2.pdf
  
• http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/whois.html