NRC

Syria: Thousands fleeing for their lives

Turkey's incursion in north-east Syria is already triggering new displacements at a moment when we were just starting to see some people begin to recover from last year’s emergency and rebuild their lives. As many as 300,000 people could reportedly be displaced by a full-blown military escalation.

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70.8 million displaced people

19.06.2019 |

Here are the crises that forced the most people to flee in 2018

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Fleeing for their lives in Central America

Butting their heads against walls – visible and invisible.
Migration from Central America to the United States is nothing new. But some of the reasons why people are leaving their homes are relatively new. More and more people are fleeing to find protection. It’s a matter of life and death.

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The world’s most neglected displacement crises

Every year, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) publishes a list of the ten most neglected displacement crises in the world. This is the list for 2018.

See the full list

The Norwegian Refugee Council is an independent humanitarian organisation helping people forced to flee. We work in crises across more than 30 countries, where we help save lives and rebuild futures.

Latest news

Somalia | 11. Nov 2019

Seven things you should know about the crisis in Somalia

Somalia caught the world’s attention in 2011 when a famine killed over a quarter of a million people. The country has been struggling with extreme weather changes, violence and disease for nearly 30 years and is increasingly subject to severe climate shocks that are worsening a prolonged humanitarian crisis. Here are seven things you should know about the crisis in Somalia:

Africa|Somalia | 01. Nov 2019

273,000 now displaced due to flooding in Somalia as more extreme weather looms

273,000 people have been left displaced due to severe flooding across Somalia. Several thousand people in the worst-affected area of Baladweeyne are sheltering under trees or in emergency tents after their makeshift homes were washed away by floods caused by torrential rain. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is calling for an urgent humanitarian response to ensure aid can be provided safely to people in desperate need.

Iraq | 30. Oct 2019

Iraq: Delivering support tent by tent

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) continues to respond to the influx of Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

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Longreads

Currently, Suleiman works together with other fishermen to provide a living for his family. But it is not easy to find enough work. He has a wife, 7 children and 1 grandchild. He works for a daily fee between 3000 to 5000 Yemeni Riyals, and he needs many things for his family to live as he and his family left everything behind when they fled.

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Yemen

How fishing communities are fighting back

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Europe

Hour of reckoning for European refugee policy

Feature

A sixteen-year-old’s flight from IS-group to Norway

$Jumana Murad, 47, in her bare rented apartment. In just over seven years, Jumana, who lives in Al Shati refugee camp near Gaza City, lost four of her children. Juliana died at age 17 in 2012 after she accidentally took the wrong medication for a severe stomach ache. Just over a year later, Lina, 14 at the time, died when she fell from the fourth floor of a building. Jumana says her son, Qusai, inhaled smoke from Israeli shells fired during the first major round of hostilities, which ran from December 2008 to January 2009, and developed respiratory problems that contributed to his death in 2014 at age 6. This year, Jumana grieved the loss of her 19-year-old daughter, Jasmin, who died from complications of kidney failure. Medical bills have left the family in debt. All told, the family owes 2,900 NIS (US$825) for groceries, prescriptions, and rent. Unpaid promissory notes to landlords have landed Jumana’s husband, Adel, a tailor by profession, in prison since July 2018. After losing his job at a factory in Israel, he worked as a cleaner in Gaza until health problems resulted in too many absences and he was let go. According to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, some 2,000 households faced the risk of eviction in 2018 over inability to pay rent. As of August this year, the Ministry of Social Development pegged the number of families under eviction risk at 9,356. Evictions have become routine for Jumana and her family over the past two years. They have found themselves often sleeping on the street or at the port several times. “When we were in the tent in the street, we felt very embarrassed whenever people walked past us,” said Jumana. “We tried to cover ourselves with plastic and carton sheets. We did not have water, so we could not shower, and our poor personal hygiene caused us skin problems.” While in the tent and on the street, the family relied on the owner of a nearby restaurant and goodwill from other people for food. Jumana’s boys also scavenged the local market for leftovers near spoiled vegetables to complement their diet of bread and tea. All five of Jumana’s surviving children dropped out of school because of the number of times they have been forced to move after getting evicted from their home, as well as lack of funds for school fees, uniforms, and transportation. Ali and Mohammad, 15, completed first grade only; their siblings Jenin, 17, and Saed, 16, made it to second grade, and Diana graduated from fifth grade. The family receives 1,600 NIS (US$453) in cash assistance from the Ministry of Social Development every three months, which are often delayed or incomplete, and UNRWA food vouchers, but often uses them to repay grocery debts. In fact, more than half of the households surveyed by NRC resorted to selling the assistance received. Since May, Jumana’s family has received cash-for-rent from NRC, as part of a project funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to support 280 vulnerable households to stave off the threat of eviction. “We are terrified of living on the street after the cash-for-rent assistance from NRC finishes,” said Jumana. “We always think about what we are going to do after the end of the project. I dream about having one room for myself one day.” The loss of the children, “one after the other," as Jumana says, has taken its toll, physically and psychologically, on the surviving family members. Adel, and Jumana’s oldest son, Ali, both have psychological problems and require expensive prescriptions. Ali, was only 15 when he had witnessed his sister plummet to her death. A four-month stint in a psychiatric hospital barely scratched the surface, and he increasingly turned to drugs and crime. Now 21, he has been serving a seven-year sentence for numerous robbery convictions since 2017. While the prison has granted Ali furlough on weekends, he has used the time, together with his family, to participate in the Great March of Return mass protests on Fridays along Gaza’s perimeter fence with Israel. Without hope or prospects for the future, Jumana says they take advantage of the free transportation to attend the demonstrations for a sense of stress release from their daily lives. Unfortunately, Ali, his sister and father were unable to escape injury. Ali was shot twice in the leg, in separate incidents in 2018, sustaining serious nerve and artery damage. His latest injury occurred in January this year, when a rubber-coated steel bullet fractured his nose. Diana, 18, sustained shrapnel wounds to her left arm and thigh in 2018. In March this year, a tear gas canister struck her in the right shoulder. While Diana’s father looked for her amid the crowds, he fell to the ground with a bullet wound to the leg. Complications arising from diabetes and kidney problems have stalled his recovery. Photo taken on 21 August 2019 Photo: Ahmed Mashharawi/NRC$

Perspective

Palestine

Mothers in Gaza face eviction threats

Perspective

DR Congo

Building new lives and rebuilding old ones

Sami* playing with shapes and colours at the NRC summer school in Tripoli.
Sami Noah* is an eight-year-old boy who had to flee with his family of five in Tripoli as a result of the ongoing war in Tripoli and western Libya. His family used to live in Al-Khalla, a suburb in southern Tripoli, which was one of the first areas affected by the indiscriminate shelling and destruction. They are a just a few of the 90,500 Libyans that have been displaced as a result of the ongoing conflict. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Libya reports that half of all displaced persons are children.
When Sami and his family were trying to flee their neighbourhood, he witnessed gunmen raiding and looting houses, and others directly shooting at passing military cars. These traumatic incidents led him to be in a constant state of fear and stress.
When they managed to flee the house safely, Sami and his family moved to stay with their relatives in Zawiyat Al-Dehmani, an area close to one of the schools supported by NRC’s Education Programme in Tripoli. In this school and in preparation for summer school, NRC education teams have delivered training on NRC’s flagship Better Learning Programme (BLP) and Teacher in Crisis Context for the teachers, focusing on child wellbeing.
Luckily, for Sami, Ms Subheya, one of the teachers who works in the school and received NRC training, knew Sami’s family. She quickly realized that NRC programs are tailored for children impacted by trauma such as Sami, and she recommended the summer school programme to his parents.
“When Sami was enrolled into the summer school, he did not want to leave his father’s side, however bit by bit and step by step we helped Sami and his family get over this fear,” she said. “I started approaching Sami during classes the way we were trained in BLP, and over a short period of time I noticed a tremendous change in his behavior and interaction with other children. He didn’t to stay with his father during class anymore.
“In order not to make Sami feel different from others during class, I also did the happy place exercise with the whole class. The exercise brought comfort to his thoughts and helped him stand on his own and engage in group activities without reaching for his father all the time, as he used to only feel safe around him,” Ms Subheya said.
Sami, his sister, and so many other displaced families suffered from the same dangers and even more, but with the support of NRC to schools in Tripoli and Benghazi, these children are having a better chance to be in a safer environment, develop stronger resilience to crises, and have access to education.
NRC began operations in Libya in 2017 and has continued to scale up its operational and programming presence supporting displaced Libyans, returnees, host communities as well as vulnerable non-Libyan communities. NRC’s education activities in Libya are supported by UNICEF and ECHO – the European Union’s humanitarian branch – and in carried out in coordination with the Ministry of Education.

* Sami’s name has been changed to protect his identity
Photo: NRC

Perspective

Libya

Sami has found his happy place

Opinions

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) distributed food (maize, lentils, oil and corn soya blend) to more than 7,100 people in Ngop. While Leer and Mayendit, both also in Unity state, have been recently declared in famine, Ngop is also in high risk. The food distribution is part of a Rapid Response Mission coordinated and funded by the World Food Programme (WFP) to mitigate this risk.

Netherlands | 31. Oct 2019

New Dutch terror bill must not target aid workers

Norwegian Refugee Council's Secretary General Jan Egeland on the border between El Salvador and Guatemala.

El Salvador|Guatemala|Honduras|USA | 21. Oct 2019

US denial of Central America’s crisis will backfire

Students waving in a renovated classroom at Ahmadlou School in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan|Iran|USA | 08. Oct 2019

In Trump-Iran showdown, Afghan refugees are neglected but devastating collateral damage

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