Okay, these are fairly round numbers. But they give us at least a broad view of the problem. According a recent UN report, approximately 100,000 Iraqis per month are leaving the country. And an average of 2,000 per day are streaming out into Syria (the rest appear to be leaving through Jordan, approximately 1,000 per day according to this Brookings report). Bear in mind that Iraq is a country of just under 27 million people. So in demographic terms, that amounts to something like arterial bleeding.
The respected international aid and advocacy group Refugees International put the numbers together in a single report and put the number of Iraqi refugees at 2.3 million, with 1.8 million in neighboring countries (overwhelmingly in Syria and Jordan) and 500,000 internally displaced refugees persons (i.e., within Iraq).
For further information, here’s a Human Rights Watch report on the treatment of Iraqi refugees in Jordan.
Beneath the aggregate numbers, there’s the next question of who’s leaving. Mass flight like this never cuts evenly across a country’s demography. I know there’s been a lot of anecdotal reports that Iraq’s small but not numerically insignificant Christian community is basically fleeing the country en masse. And in January of 2006, a UN report said that 40% of “professionals” — though that term can mean different things — had left the country since the invasion. Given what’s happened this year it seems inconceivable that the number hasn’t ballooned since.
As we used to say in the Cold War (though it was perhaps Lenin’s coinage?), people vote with their feet.
