Refugee Crisis: Where Are All These People Coming from and Why?

Refugee Crisis: Where Are All These People Coming from and Why?

Patrick Cockburn

• September 8, 2015 | http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/refugee-crisis-where-are-all-these-people-coming-from-and-why/

It is an era of violence in the Middle East and North Africa, with nine civil wars now going on in Islamic countries between Pakistan and Nigeria. This is why there are so many refugees fleeing for their lives. Half of the 23 million population of Syria have been forced from their homes, with four million becoming refugees in other countries.
Some 2.6 million Iraqis have been displaced by Islamic State – Isis – offensives in the last year and squat in tents or half-finished buildings. Unnoticed by the outside world, some 1.5 million people have been displaced in South Sudan since fighting there resumed at the end of 2013.
Other parts of the world, notably south-east Asia, have become more peaceful over the last 50 years or so, but in the vast swathe of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the western side of the Sahara, religious, ethnic and separatist conflicts are tearing countries apart. Everywhere states are collapsing, weakening or are under attack; and, in many of these places, extreme Sunni Islamist insurgencies are on the rise which use terror against civilians in order to provoke mass flight.http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/refugee-crisis-where-are-all-these-people-coming-from-and-why/