Conflict forced more than 10 million additional people to leave their homes and live in other parts of their country in 2018—bringing the total number of so-called internally displaced people due to violence to a record high of 41 million, an all-time high. The numbers come from a new report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). The most-affected populations came from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Cameroon, and Nigeria, according to the study. Among those, 6.1 million are displaced within Syria. “It is really a mind-boggling figure,” said NRC Chief Jan Egeland. “It takes extreme violence and fear of disasters to force a family out of their home, their land, their property, their community.” If the number of people displaced from their homes by natural disasters is included, a total of 28 million people were displaced internally in 2018, according to the figures from the report.
