WASHINGTON, July 6 (UPI) -- The displacement of Iraqi refugees -- close to 4 million -- represents the most serious crisis involving population movements in the Middle East since the exodus of Palestinians in 1948, when fleeing the creation of the state of Israel, hundreds of thousands established themselves in decrepit refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, as well as in Gaza and in the West Bank.

Yet despite their numbers, the Iraqis remain "an invisible refugee crisis," Ken Bacon, president of Refugees International, said at a Washington conference earlier this week. Roughly half of the refugees fled to safer areas within Iraq; the other half went mainly to Syria and Jordan.

The best way to stop Iraqis from fleeing is to create a safe and stable Iraq, which has been the government's main focus for the last few years...The short-term goal is to relieve the burden of those and other countries and prevent them from sending Iraqi refugees home...

The long-term goal is to avoid having another refugee population that can destabilize the Middle East. "When we think of the Iraqi refugee crisis, we should consider it the way people in the region do: through the prism of the Palestinian refugee crisis," Nir Rosen of the New America Foundation said at the news conference. After the Israeli-Arab conflict in 1948, many Palestinians found refuge in the region. In 2005, 4.4 million Palestinians were registered as refugees, according to U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

The majority of the refugees are Sunni, Rosen said, and "Syria has been the most generous by far in terms of accepting refugees and also in granting them rights." Until recently, Iraqis got the same healthcare as Syrians and their children could go to school for free, he said, but now classes are overcrowded and "schools are exploding..."

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