After Turkey received a massive influx of refugees last month fleeing Syria’s civil war, the United Nations has now put the total number of refugees from that conflict at more than four million, The New York Times reported Thursday.

More than 24,000 people crossed into Turkey to escape fighting in northern Syria in June, pushing the number now sheltering in neighboring countries past four million, increasing the Syrian refugee population by one million in just 10 months, the United Nations refugee agency reported. …

“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation,” Antonio Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said in a statement. Mr. Guterres, once again, warned that international aid was not keeping pace with the scale of the crisis, and that many refugees were “sinking deeper into poverty.” …

The latest influx into Turkey raised the number of Syrian refugees there to 1.8 million, giving it the biggest refugee population in the world, the United Nations reported. As many as 1.2 million Syrians are now sheltering in Lebanon, more than 629,000 are in Jordan and close to quarter of a million have fled to Iraq.

In addition, there are than 7.6 million Syrians who are internally displaced due to the fighting. The death toll for the conflict surpassed 200,000 earlier this year.

Iranian support for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been essential to keeping him in power and prolonging the conflict. Two years ago, the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah provided critical support to the Assad regime in the battle for the city of Qusayr on the border with Lebanon.

[Photo: Freedom House / Flickr ]