Beirut: The number of Syrian refugees registered in neighbouring countries has nearly doubled since the beginning of September to more than 440,000, the UN refugee agency said Friday.

“Across the region... the number of Syrian refugees in surrounding countries now stands at 442,256, an increase of more than 213,000 since the beginning of September,” UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards told reporters in Geneva.

“And this figure does not include the hundreds of thousands more Syrians who did not come forward for registration,” he said.

The agency said it currently counted 127,420 Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon, 125,670 in Jordan, 123,747 in Turkey, 55,685 in Iraq and 9,734 in the North African countries.

In Iraq, the number of registered Syrian refugees had tripled since September 1 when only 18,700 were registered there, the agency said in a statement.

Three quarters of all Syrian refugees in Iraq were in the Kurdistan region, and nearly half were in camps, it said.

The Domiz camp in the north of the Kurdistan region was housing around 18,500 people, and had for the past two months received around 500-600 new arrivals per day, it said.

Emergency aid

In Jordan, meanwhile, “nearly 4,500 desperate and exhausted Syrian refugees have crossed the border over the past eight days, most of them women and children,” the UNHCR said, adding that most came from the villages of Hrak, Sawra, Dael and Qubeit Al Gazal in Daraa.

“Our teams on the ground say those arriving over the past week were among the most frightened they have seen so far, particularly the women,” it said.

The agency, which aims to deliver emergency aid to 500,000 people across Syria by the end of the year, said Friday it had so far reached around 300,000.

The UN estimates that around 2.5 million Syrians are in need of emergency aid inside the war-torn country.

More than 40,000 people have been killed across Syria since the uprising against President Bashar Al Assad’s regime began in March 2011, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights

Meanwhile, Iran’s influential parliament speaker Ali Larijani met Al Assad in Damascus on Friday to discuss a solution to the conflict in his country’s key ally, reports said.

Solution

The meeting came as Moscow warned Turkey against deploying Patriot missiles on its troubled border with war-torn Syria after Ankara turned to Nato to request the surface-to-air defences.

On the ground, violence erupted in Syrian flashpoints across the country while tensions spiked in the northeast, where Kurdish militia are engaged in a standoff with rebel fighters.

Larijani said before leaving Tehran that he would “try to find a solution to the Syrian problem” on a regional tour that will also take him to Lebanon and Turkey, Iran’s Mehr news agency said.

In Damascus, Larijani accused regional powers he did not name of causing “problems” in Syria, in an allusion to the principal champions of arming the rebels fighting to overthrow Al Assad’s regime — Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

“Syria has played an important role in supporting the resistance [against Israel and the United States] but some in the region want to carry out actions with negative consequences, to cause problems in Syria,” he told journalists.

“But Iran appreciates the key role Syria has played in supporting the resistance,” he added.