| Disputes - international | Golan Heights is Israeli-controlled with an almost 1,000-strong UN Disengagement Observer Force patrolling a buffer zone since 1964; lacking a treaty or other documentation describing the boundary, portions of the Lebanon-Syria boundary are unclear with several sections in dispute; since 2000, Lebanon has claimed Shab'a Farms in the Golan Heights; 2004 Agreement and pending demarcation would settle border dispute with Jordan |
| Illicit drugs | a transit point for opiates, hashish, and cocaine bound for regional and Western markets; weak anti-money-laundering controls and bank privatization may leave it vulnerable to money laundering |
| Refugees and internally displaced persons | refugees (country of origin): 13,311 (Iraq) (2019); 562,312 (Palestinian Refugees) (2020) IDPs: 6.568 million (ongoing civil war since 2011) (2020) stateless persons: 160,000 (2020); note - Syria's stateless population consists of Kurds and Palestinians; stateless persons are prevented from voting, owning land, holding certain jobs, receiving food subsidies or public healthcare, enrolling in public schools, or being legally married to Syrian citizens; in 1962, some 120,000 Syrian Kurds were stripped of their Syrian citizenship, rendering them and their descendants stateless; in 2011, the Syrian Government granted citizenship to thousands of Syrian Kurds as a means of appeasement; however, resolving the question of statelessness is not a priority given Syria's ongoing civil war note: the ongoing civil war has resulted in more than 5.6 million registered Syrian refugees - dispersed in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey - as of July 2021 |
| Trafficking in persons | current situation: due to Syria’s civil war, hundreds of thousands of Syrians, foreign migrant workers, and refugees have fled the country and are vulnerable to human trafficking; the lack of security and inaccessibility of the majority of the country makes it impossible to conduct a thorough analysis of the impact of the ongoing conflict on the scope and magnitude of Syria’s human trafficking situation; prior to the uprising, the Syrian armed forces and opposition forces used Syrian children in combat and support roles and as human shields tier rating: Tier 3 — Syria does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so; the government does not hold any traffickers, including complicit officials, criminally accountable for trafficking; no trafficking victims were identified or received protection during the reporting period; government and pro-Syrian militias continued to forcibly recruit and use child soldiers; the government does not prevent armed opposition forces and designated terrorist organizations from recruiting children; authorities continued to arrest, detain, and severely abuse trafficking victims, including child soldiers, and punished them for unlawful acts traffickers compelled them to commit (2020) |
Source: CIA World Factbook
This page was last updated on September 18, 2021
