Nearly 50 million children uprooted: A global crisis by the numbers

A Syrian refugee child at camp in Suruc, on the Turkey-Syria border, in June 2015. (Emrah Gurel / Associated Press)

The haunting images of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi's body washed up on a Turkish beach, and of Omran Daqneesh's bloodied and bewildered face after his home was destroyed in Aleppo, have become emblems of the heavy toll inflicted by war and displacement on the world's children.

But the sheer magnitude of the toll has been hard to quantify in any detail. Too often, information is lacking on child refugees and migrants.

A new report by the United Nations children’s agency, titled “Uprooted: The growing crisis for refugee and migrant children,” attempts to assemble the best figures available.

The findings are staggering: 50 million children driven from their homes as of last year, more than half of them by conflict and persecution, and the rest in search of a better life.

“These children may be refugees, internally displaced or migrants, but first and foremost, they are children,” UNICEF said in the report published Wednesday.

"Children do not bear any responsibility for the bombs and bullets, the gang violence, persecution, the shriveled crops and low family wages driving them from their homes. They are, however, always the first to be affected by war, conflict, climate change and poverty."

Here are some key findings:

11 million: The number of child refugees and asylum seekers

Children make up a disproportionate and growing share of those forced to seek refuge outside their homeland. Whereas they made up about a third of the world's population in 2015, they accounted for nearly half of all refugees.

About 45% of the children under the protection of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees came from just two countries: Syria and Afghanistan.

Turkey hosted the largest number of new refugees and probably also the largest number of child refugees, the report says.

Relative to its population, however, the burden assumed by Lebanon is unrivaled: about 1 in 5 people in the country is a refugee. By comparison, there is roughly 1 refugee for every 1,200 people in the United States.