UNITED NATIONS, June 20 (UPI) -- The world's refugee population grew by 14 percent last year, largely due to people fleeing the war in Iraq, said a U.N. report released Wednesday.
Those fleeing Iraq pushed the world's number of refugees to nearly 10 million -- the highest level since 2002, said the "2006 Global Trends" report by the U.N. High Commission on Refugees.
The number of people "uprooted by persecution, intolerance and violence" demands that the United Nations remain faithful to its mandate to defend the rights of refugees, said High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.
By the end of last year, nearly 1.5 million Iraqis had sought refuge in other countries, particularly Syria and Jordan. In 2006, the largest other groups of refugees under the commission's mandate were 2.1 million Afghans, 686,000 Sudanese, 460,000 Somalis and about 400,000 refugees each from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi.
The figures don't include the 4.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Occupied Territories, who fall under a separate U.N. mandate. When Palestinians are added, the total number of refugees under both agencies' mandates is more than 14 million.
