With the crisis in Iraq, four countries are now experiencing severe humanitarian emergencies involving the displacement of millions of people, something experts and relief groups say hasn’t been seen in decades.
Iraq, Syria, the Central African Republic and South Sudan are all going through Level 3 emergencies, the United Nations’ highest classification of a humanitarian crisis.
It is the first time that the world has experienced four simultaneous emergencies of this caliber since at least World War II. Some experts note that the number of displaced people is worse than after the Rwanda genocide of 1994, during which 500,000 to 1 million people were killed and up to 2 million people fled their homes.
“In terms of major humanitarian responses, this is about as big as I can remember,” said Jarrod Goentzel, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Humanitarian Response Lab.
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