UNITED NATIONS -- With assistance of the UN, a group of more than 100 Syrian refugees will leave Lebanon on Wednesday for temporary relocation in Germany, a UN spokesperson said here Tuesday.
"On Wednesday, 107 highly vulnerable Syrian refugees are due to leave Lebanon under a temporary Humanitarian Admissions Program that was announced by Germany in March of this year," Martin Nesirky, spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, told reporters at the daily briefing.
The new arrivals will be the first Syrian refugees to enter Germany under the program, Nesirky said, adding that "the group is headed for Hannover," the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony in the north of the country.
The group is also "the first to be assisted by the UNHCR in this process," said Nesirky.
Germany's Humanitarian Assistance Program provides for up to 5, 000 places for Syrian refugees, and it is the biggest relocation program currently in existence for the Syria crisis, he said.
The UNHCR teams in the Syria region "are preparing additional referrals for this program," Nesirky added.
According to UN estimates, as of the end August, the number of Syrians registered as refugees or pending registration was 200,000 in Iraq, 520,000 in Jordan, some 720,000 in Lebanon and 464,000 in Turkey.
The four countries host the majority of the 2 million refugees who have fled Syria since March 2011.
At the current trend, an average of almost 5,000 Syrians flee into these countries every day, half of them children.
