Lebanon has officially been declared by the United Nations agency as harboring an exceeding one million Syrian refugees, marking the event as a "devastating milestone" on Thursday, Reuters reported.
An 18-year-old student from the city of Homs was formally registered as the millionth Syrian refugee at a ceremony in Lebanon's Mediterranean city of Tripoli.
The tiny Arab state, with depleted resources and an explosive sectarian mix of its own, has been burdened by an excess of refugees escaping from the increasing humanitarian catastrophe caused by Syria's civil war.
"After three years of conflict sparked by protests against President Bashar al-Assad's autocratic rule, Syria's war has caused one of the greatest upheavals seen in the Middle East - and one which shows no sign of abating," Reuters reported. "With a population of just 4 million, Lebanon now has the highest per capita concentration of refugees worldwide, an influx which the government has described as an existential threat in a country scarred by its own volatile history."
Each single day, almost 2,500 new refugees are registered in Lebanon, the UN said.
"The extent of the human tragedy is not just the recitation of numbers," UNHCR representative Ninette Kelley told reporters in Tripoli. "Each one of these numbers represents a human life who ... have lost their homes, their family members, their sense of future."
While Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt are some other countries that have been chosen as safe havens for fleeing Syrian refugees, the tragic reality almost makes it certain that the 2.6 million refugees will soon overtake Afghans as the world's biggest refugee population.
With only 356,000 refugees taking resort in Lebanon in April 2013, the last 12 months have seen the number almost triple, Reuters reported.
"The influx of a million refugees would be massive in any country. For Lebanon, a small nation beset by internal difficulties, the impact is staggering," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said in a statement.
