GENEVA
Violent conflict displaced 38 million people within their own country last year, an international monitoring agency reported Wednesday.
"These are the worst figures for forced displacement in a generation, signaling our complete failure to protect innocent civilians," Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, said in a statement.
The center compiled the Global Overview 2015 report, unveiled at the UN in Geneva, from data from governments, NGOs and UN agencies.
"With internal displacement figures reaching a record high for the third year in a row… 11 million people were newly displaced by violent events throughout 2014," the report added.
There were 38 million internally displaced at the end of 2014, a 4.7 million increase on the previous year. Six out of ten of those displaced were in five countries -- Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria.
In Iraq, where there was the highest number of freshly displaced civilians, at least 2.2 million people fled their homes.
Around 40 percent of Syria’s population -- 7.6 million people -- has been internally displaced.
"For the first time in more than a decade Europe had massive enforced displacement caused by the war in Ukraine, where 646,500 people fled their homes in 2014," the report added.
