As of 2026. Displacement figures have been falling since the fall of the Assad government in December 2024, with over a million refugee returns recorded and the UN projecting up to a million more during 2026, so the headline figure describes the war's peak rather than the current position.
What began as peaceful protests against Bashar al-Assad's government in March 2011 escalated into a full-scale civil war involving the Syrian government (backed by Russia and Iran), a fragmented array of opposition and jihadist factions, Kurdish-led forces in the northeast, Turkey, and periodic Israeli and US strikes. Over more than a decade, the war displaced over 13 million people at its peak: roughly 6.8 million refugees, hosted mainly by Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and 6.7–7.2 million internally displaced within Syria, alongside hundreds of thousands of deaths. Chemical weapons attacks, sieges of cities such as Aleppo and Ghouta, and the rise and fall of ISIS's self-declared caliphate compounded the humanitarian crisis. Assad's government collapsed in a rapid opposition offensive in December 2024, after which over a million Syrians began returning from abroad and from internal displacement, though the country's political transition and the fate of millions of remaining refugees and IDPs remained unresolved as of 2026.
A popular uprising against the government of Bashar al-Assad escalated into a multi-sided civil war involving Syrian government forces, an array of opposition and jihadist groups, Kurdish-led forces, and foreign militaries (Russia, Iran, Turkey, the US, and Israel), driving the largest displacement crisis in the world until Assad's government fell in December 2024.
World Bank and UN series put Syria's population at about 21 million in 2011; the Syrian Central Bureau of Statistics projected 22.5 million from the 2004 census. At the peak of the displacement roughly 6.8 million Syrians were registered as refugees, chiefly in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and about 7 million were displaced inside the country — together more than half the pre-war population.
The UN Human Rights Office's statistically modelled estimate of 306,887 civilian deaths (95 per cent credible interval 281,443-337,971) covers 1 March 2011 to 31 March 2021 and counts civilians only, combining 143,350 individually documented deaths with 163,537 imputed via multiple systems estimation; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights' nearly 618,000 covers all deaths including 343,344 combatants through 2024 and excludes over 55,000 it believes died under torture in government detention but could not document. The former Syrian government rejected both, and neither total captures the March 2025 coastal killings or later violence.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, OHCHR, the Syrian Network for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch documented sieges and deliberate starvation of civilian areas, chemical attacks, systematic torture and deaths in government detention, tens of thousands of enforced disappearances, sexual violence, and the destruction of homes and neighbourhoods.
Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan