So wrote France's great writer, Victor Hugo,  of the horrors he had witnessed during the Balkan liberation wars of the 1880's. If Hugo were alive today, he might well have used the same haunting lines to describe the smoking wreckage of the Mideast. Except this time it was the  United States, France and Britain who  wrought havoc in the Arab world, assisted by modern Turkey.

The UN's refugee czar, Antonio Guterres, just asserted that there are now 4,013,000 Syrian refugees outside their homeland, and another 7.6 million as internal refugees from the war raging there since 2011.

That total's some 11.6 million refugees- a staggering 50% of Syria's population. Over a quarter million are refugees in Europe; the rest spread across the Mideast with the largest numbers in Lebanon and Jordan.