Day 1,113: Meet Lebanon’s millionth Syrian refugee

Today is Day 1,113 of the Syria conflict.

The UN has now registered over one million refugees in Lebanon. Yehia, above, was the millionth, registered in Tripoli this morning. According to UNHCR, Lebanon now has "the highest per capita concentration of refugees" of any country in the world. 

The true number of refugees in Lebanon is doubtless much higher than one million. As GlobalPost correspondent Tracey Shelton found in the Lebanese border town of Arsal back in March, many refugees fleeing Syria haven't yet registered with the UN — many, in fact, are deliberately avoiding registration.

In other news: Bloomberg today has a story on Russia's arms shipments to the Syrian government. There's been no further development on the story from earlier this week, wherein the published letter of Syria's UN envoy, Bashar Ja'afari, alleged that rebels were planning a chemical attack in an area near Damascus, planning to blame it on the government forces. A "senior Western diplomat" told Reuters yesterday that these allegations were nonsense, so who knows. On the general subject of chemical weapons attacks, however, the leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, has come out and said that he believes the chemical weapons attacks in Syria last summer that had Western countries weighing intervention (sort of) were carried out by rebels, not by the Syrian government. This is also what one very frustrated MIT physicist thinks — you can read the GlobalPost coverage of this debate here.

The conflict continues.

A Syrian refugee sits with his children at a UNHCR (United Nations Refugee Agency) registration center, one of many across Lebanon, in the northern port city of Tripoli. (Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)
Syrian refugees queue up at a UNHCR (United Nations Refugee Agency) registration center, one of many across Lebanon, in the northern port city of Tripoli. (Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)