Out of Control Violence…… Conflicts and violence raging around the world sent the number of people forced to flee their homes soaring to a record 60 million last year, the United Nations said Thursday. That is 8.3 million more refugees and internally displaced people in the world than in 2013 — the highest-ever increase in a single year, the UN refugee agency said in a report titled “World at War”.

A whopping 59.5 million individuals were displaced from their homes worldwide at the end of 2014, “as a result of persecution, conflict, generalised violence, or human rights violations”, the report showed. That is up from 51.2 million in 2013 and from 37.5 million a decade ago, and if these people were lumped together as a nation, it would be the world’s 24th largest. Of the total, 19.5 million were refugees, 1.8 million were asylum seekers and 38.2 million had fled their homes but stayed in their country, the report said. More than half of the world’s refugees are children, up from 41 percent in 2009, while the total number of people who fled their homes has spiked by 40 percent in just three years.

In Europe, more than 219,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea during 2014. That’s almost three times the previously known high of about 70,000, which took place in 2011,” the report said. At the end of 2014, the world’s top host for refugees was Turkey, sheltering 1.59 million people, followed by Pakistan (1.51 million) and Lebanon (1.15 million). The number of Syrian refugees taking shelter in Turkey has further risen this year to more than 1.7 million, according to the latest UN data, since war broke out in Syria in 2011.

Record 60 million fled ‘out of control’ violence in 2014: UN