WASHINGTON: KILIS (Turkey): Dania Amroosh wears a Hello Kitty shirt, tiny heart-shaped earrings and her hair in cute little pigtails. She looks like any other seven-year-old, except for the jagged scars on the bridge of her nose and across her chin.

There is much worse beneath her blanket on the third floor of the Kilis State Hospital in southern Turkey. A huge seeping wound on her stomach is closed with an angry grid of stitches. The casts are finally off her broken right leg and right hand, but her fingers are still black and blue and she can barely walk. Her lower body is covered with shrapnel scars.

Five months ago, Dania and her family were sitting in their home in Aleppo, Syria, about 60 miles south of here, when a bomb dropped from the sky. Her grandmother, aunt, uncle and two cousins were killed instantly. Another cousin lost his legs. Dania was mangled.

Mohammad Amroosh, her father, says that after what Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military did to them, he can’t go back. When Dania is ready to leave the hospital, the family will stay in Turkey, joining nearly 700,000 other Syrians who have taken shelter in the country.

“This is our home now,” he says.

One of the world’s largest forced migrations since World War II is transforming the Middle East.

The United Nations and governments in the countries where the refugees have taken shelter estimate that between 2.3 million and 2.8 million Syrians have fled their homeland. The United Nations says that number is rising by nearly 3,000 people a day, with no end in sight for a conflict that has lasted nearly three years.

The cost of the Syrian civil war continues to rise beyond the estimated 125,000 people killed and the tens of thousands maimed. The massive influx of refugees into neighbouring countries — especially Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey — is crippling fragile economies and damaging delicate political and religious balances in the region.

“These places will never be the same,” said Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand, who now spends much or her time in the region as head of the UN Development Programme. “Many of these people will never go home.”

UN officials estimate that a third or more of the people living in Lebanon will soon be Syrian refugees — 1.6 million in a country of with a pre-war population of just 4.4 million people — or, as Clark said, “the equivalent of the entire population of Mexico taking refuge in the US.”

Competition for homes, jobs and government services has created anger that regularly spills over into protests, even as most people welcome their neighbours in need.

Host countries are spending billions building schools, hospitals, water and sewage systems, power plants, roads and housing to cope with the population surge.

Refugee camps increasingly look like permanent cities, with local governments, schools, hospitals, mosques, supermarkets and internet cafes.

A new generation is rising in the camps with the births of thousands of children. Arabic-speaking Syrian children are learning Turkish in school to prepare for a life in exile.

Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, with 120,000 people, is suddenly the country’s fourth-largest city. A new camp under construction deep in the desert is expected to be even bigger. Rather than tents and trailers, it has steel-framed buildings, an acknowledgment that the crisis will last many years.

More than three-quarters of the refugees live outside of camps, renting apartments or garage space, finding shelter in abandoned buildings or constructing homes on vacant land. The population of many towns has doubled or tripled virtually overnight.While many of those fleeing are destitute, large numbers of Syrian professionals and business leaders have left, too. They are buying, renting or even building high-end real estate in Beirut, Amman and Istanbul.

Rising demand has driven up rents across the region, in many cases forcing local people out of their homes. Some Jordanian families are living in UN tents meant for Syrian refugees. The region’s worst winter storm in years has added to the misery in recent days. Jordanian officials said it will cost $1.7 billion to continue housing the nearly 600,000 refugees in the country, including the construction of power plants, sewage treatment plants, hospitals and 120 schools in the coming months.

Before the Syrian war, Kilis was a quiet outpost of about 80,000 people on the Syrian border. Now its population is at least 130,000.

Before the war, Lebanon’s population was about 60 per cent Muslim, with almost equal numbers of Sunnis and Shias. The flood of refugees threatens to upset that delicate equilibrium. The vast majority of the million or so Syrian refugees in Lebanon are Sunnis. That nearly doubles the number of Sunnis in a country where sectarian tensions are always high.

Growing resentment about the large numbers of refugees has led to protests and occasional violence across the region. In Lebanon early this month, refugees said local villagers in the Bekaa Valley attacked an informal encampment where at least 400 refugees were living, torching tents and tearing down other makeshift structures.

Perhaps weary of war, maybe bewildered by and suspicious of the complex web of factions warring inside Syria, the world has been slower to donate help to Syrian refugees than it has in other recent catastrophes.

By arrangement with the Washington Post/Bloomberg News Service