More people were forced from their homes as of last year than any time since World War II
In total, 65.6 million people have been forced to leave their homes by 2016, a new United Nations Global Trends report released Monday found.
The number has grown by more than 300,000 since 2015.
With longstanding wars rocking countries such as Syria and Iraq, the number of displaced people is nearly double the number it was in 1997. In 2016 alone, 10.3 million people were newly displaced from their homes.
While political instability in the Middle East has drawn attention to the global refugee crisis, most displaced people have first tried to flee to other regions of their own country. 40.3 million people are currently internally displaced, 22.5 million are refugees and 2.8 million are asking other countries to grant them asylum, according to the report.
"By any measure this is an unacceptable number, and it speaks louder than ever to the need for solidarity and common purpose in preventing and resolving crises," United Nations High Commissioner Fillippo Grandi said in a statement, according to The New York Times.
While the ongoing conflict in Syria once again contributed to the largest number of displaced people, countries all over the world had high numbers of people who were forced to leave their homes. By 2016, 12 million of the people displaced came from Syria, 7.7 million came from Colombia, 4.7 million came from Afghanistan, 4.2 from Iraq, and 3.3 million from South Sudan.
After decades of conflict between government forces and insurgency groups, Colombia had the highest number of internally displaced people in the world.