OVERVIEW
Arrivals to Greece from Turkey were 27% lower in December, with 28% fewer "irregular migrants" involved in incidents in the seas surrounding Turkey. Small numbers of migrants arriving to Cyprus were reported this month, with 38 bringing the yearly total to 1,067, compared to only 345 in 2016. At least 57 Turkish nationals sought political asylum or used irregular routes to exit Turkey in December, adding to the wave of asylum applications following the attempted coup of July 2016. Though refugee and IDP returns to and within Iraq continued this month, internal and secondary displacement remains ongoing as result of security operations against the so-called Islamic State and forced evictions, with 136 families displaced from their homes between Anbar and Salah Al-Din between 24 November and 7 December. During the same period, pro-central government armed forces occupied 130 homes reportedly belonging to Kurdish families in Kirkuk. At least 330 families were evicted from Ameriyat Al-Fallujah, camps in Anbar, Baghdad and informal settlements in Tikrit, with as many as 13,000 estimated to be at risk of future eviction campaigns. The number of Iraqis in camps in Syria's Al-Hasakeh governorate dropped by 30% to 11,625 at the beginning of December, before tripling again to 33,412 by the end of the month, the reasons for which remain unclear. The last of Lebanon's border crossings with Syria opened on 14 December under the management of Syrian government forces. Meanwhile, the number of registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon dropped below 1 million for the first time in December since 2014 to 997,905 (though new registrations have been on hold since January 2015). Results of a new census indicated the numbers of registered Palestinians residing in the country is at least 60% lower than recorded by UNRWA in 2014, at 174,422.
Eight Syrian children were killed in a fire that spread through an informal tented settlement in the Bekaa Valley on 8 December, that also displaced 40 families. In 2017, spontaneous returns of Syrians from Jordan are estimated at 7,063. Nonetheless, by the end of December, Syrians represented the most common nationality of arrival to Greece by sea in 2017, at 12,395 (41.7%). 15,000 were newly displaced within northern Syria in December, a 22.3% increase from the 11,660 recorded in November.
This contributed to the 1,194,829 individuals that have been displaced in northern Syria in the last 12 months, despite evidence of ongoing returns.
