As explained in "Surviving in the City," a new report from UNHCR's Policy Development and Evaluation Service (PDES), the organization is familiar with the demands of coping with large and sudden movements of refugees. But in most cases, those people are housed in camps. The unique feature of the Iraqi situation is that the vast majority of exiled Iraqis have settled in the cities of neighbouring and nearby states, especially Amman in Jordan, Beirut in Lebanon as well as Damascus and Aleppo in Syria. The report points out that UNHCR's task in these countries was complicated by a number of other factors, including its limited presence in the Middle East, the absence of refugee laws in the three countries of asylum, as well as their preoccupation with the Palestinian refugee question.
