450,000 refugees out of Iraq.

I have been watching the internal "displacement" in Iraq as such a Balkanization could lead to a far fiercer, more open, street battle, territorial type of civil war where neighborhoods are "taken" in conflict and then "purged."

The most recent estimates of internal displacement place the number between 60,000 and 100,000 Iraqis, although this doesn't include the current movements out of Ramadi(10,000 so far, per the UN.)

But this article is talking about the people who just up and left Iraq completely.

Ann Maymann, a protection officer at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Damascus, asks: “Who in the international community wants to say there is a refugee crisis in Syria and Jordan? Because saying that is to admit that the US-led war created the conditions for this.”

International aid agencies are publishing the first comprehensive report into the plight of Iraqi refugees in Syria since the start of the Iraq war in 2003. They estimate that 450,000 Iraqi refugees now live there, and warn of increasing prostitution among Iraqi women and girls, some as young as 12 years old, and find evidence of “organised networks dealing with the sex trade”.

Also: Just a horrible story offering alot of details out of the Baghdad morgue.