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September 2nd, 2013 
Peter Nolan 
Hassan Ammar / AP, file
A child sits on the floor at the Kertaj Hotel in Damascus, Syria, as her mother prepares a meal, in August. The family fled their home because of the civil war.
Some 6.2 million Syrians have been displaced by the country’s deadly civil war, the United Nations said Monday as the White House continued to lobby lawmakers to approve U.S. military action over chemical weapons.
Of those displaced, two million have fled across the border into neighboring countries, said Peter Kessler, spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, quoting figures expected to be announced by the U.N. Tuesday.
Based on recent population estimates, it means between one quarter and one third of the country’s population has been displaced.
It comes as the U.S. and its allies lay the diplomatic and political groundwork for strikes on Syria in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack by the regime of President Bashar Assad.
President Barack Obama is trying to drum up support for a military strike after announcing on Saturday he will seek congressional approval for any intervention.
Obama is meeting with Sen. John McCain at the White House, Reuters reported Monday, in the hope the man he defeated in 2008’s presidential election can help him convince the U.S. people that an intervention is necessary.
This follows Secretary of State John Kerry telling NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday that samples collected from the site of the chemical weapons attack have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, which is used in chemical warfare.
NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen also told reporters on Monday he had seen evidence convincing him Syrian government forces were responsible for the attack, Reuters reported.
In another development on Monday, a U.S. Defense Department Official confirmed that the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz had arrived in the Red Sea.
Russia, an arms supplier to Assad which opposes military intervention, said Kerry’s chemical-weapons evidence was “unconvincing” and fell far short of the standard needed to justify military action, a New York Times report said, quoting Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov.
The Interfax news agency also reported Russia was sending a reconnaissance ship, the Priazovye, to the eastern Mediterranean which President Vladimir Putin said was necessary to protect national security interests, Reuters said.
Speaking ahead of the UNHCR figures’ official release, Kessler said just $1.5 billion of the U.N.’s record $5-billion Syrian aid appeal has been raised.
“There are enormous needs across the region,” he told NBC News. “We have refugees in camps which need more schools, and refugees in cities who need more access to health care. So there are enormous needs.”
He said more than 100,000 people have been killed in Syria, which had a pre-war population of around 20.8 million, since the 2011 uprising against Assad.
The international community is still deciding how to respond to the reported chemical weapons attack on August 21, in which Assad is alleged to have killed more than 1,400 people, including women and children.
Alice Martins / AFP – Getty Images
A look back at the conflict that has overtaken the country.
The French government, like the U.S., is not required to get the say-so of lawmakers before embarking on military action, but President Francois Hollande is determined not to bow to opposition pressure for a special vote, foreign affairs committee Elisabeth Guigou said in a Reuters report.
Even so, French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault is expected to reveal secret classified documents on Syria’s chemical stockpile to a group of parliamentarians who have been invited to Matignon, his office in Paris. They are to privately discuss the situation in Syria before Wednesday’s parliamentary debate on the issue.
The U.K. parliament already voted down a government-backed motion on the principle of military action, as well as an amendment from the opposition Labour party. But despite calls from some lawmakers to look at the issue again, ITV News reported that a spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday there would not be another vote.
NATO Secretary-General Rasmussen said he believes firm international response is needed on Syria, and that inaction would be “a dangerous signal to dictators all over the world”. But he was widely reported to have said last week that NATO has no plans for military action itself.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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