The Syrian conflict has driven tens of thousands of refugees into neighboring countries, triggering both general regional instability and country-specific crises in Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon.

American and U.N. diplomats have described the displacement of literally “millions of people. Sectarian strife locked in by the conflict had already as of the summer claimed hundreds of lives beyond Syria’s borders.

Human rights officials and diplomats have begun calling attention to an additional, unique dimension of the refugee crisis. The U.N. noted recently that the number of displaced children has crossed one million:

Roughly half of all the nearly 2 million registered refugees from Syria are children, and some 740,000 of those are under the age of 11, according to the U.N. refugee and children’s agencies. “This one millionth child refugee is not just another number,” said Anthony Lake, the head of UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency. “This is a real child ripped from home, maybe even from a family, facing horrors we can only begin to comprehend.”

[Photo: FreedomHouse / Flickr]