In an interview Tuesday, Jordanian Queen Rania talked to Sky News about what the last five years of taking in refugees has looked like for her country.
Since the civil war began in Syria in 2011, 1.4 million refugees have fled to the tiny Hashemite Kingdom. What does that mean exactly?
"That's 20 per cent of our population. To put that into context, it's the equivalent of 12 million people coming to the UK, or 16 million going to Germany," she said.
The massive increase in refugees heading overseas has made Western counties more wary than ever. But with dwindling cash from international donors and a fragile economy of their own, Jordan's been a frayed net supporting neighboring Syria since the beginning.
And the outpour of refugees didn't start there, either.
Syrians are only the latest in a long string of exoduses from Middle East conflicts. And understanding the true volume of the displacement facing places like Jordan means going back long before this civil war.
Some 650,000 refugees are registered with UN's refugee agency in Jordan, but as Queen Rania noted, that's just half of an estimated 1.4 million Syrians living in Jordan, a country whose own population is just over 6 million. Add those numbers to Iraqis arriving after both the Gulf War in 1991 and the US invasion in 2003. The UNHCR estimates some 400,000 Iraqis are living in Jordan, counting both refugees and other migrants.
In one year alone, some 40,000 have fled to the country after Daesh (ISIS) stormed into northern Iraq last summer.
Similar numbers are reported in the rest of the region's refugee hosts — Lebanon has 1.2 million, Turkey has 1.4 million.
So when countries like Britain hesitate to take 20,000 refugees by the end of the year and Hungary builds razon wire fences to keep people out, it's important to remember that the crisis European leaders are decrying now needs some serious regional context to keep the hysteria in check.
Here's what that looks like (via Twitter).
