Each year on World Refugee Day, the world honors the courage and the resilience of millions of people across the globe who have been forced to flee from violence and conflict.
For the first time since the World War II era, the number of refugees worldwide has passed 50 million, the United Nations announced in its annual Global Trends Report. The organization explained that the massive displacement of Syrians due to the country's civil war contributed significantly to the rise. "These numbers represent a quantum leap in forced displacement around the world," U.N. High Commissioner Antonio Gutteres said on Friday.
The powerful images of refugee children below remind us what we can't forget the plight of the youngest of those displaced.
A child displaced from fighting between Democratic Republic of Congo troops driving M23 rebels from one of their key hilltop positions in the east of the country cries on Nov. 4, 2013 in the eastern city of Rutshuru. (Junior D. Kannah/AFP/Getty Images)
A Syrian refugee man begs in the street with a baby lying on his lap in Istanbul on June 19, 2014. (BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images)
An Iraqi refugee girl from Mosul stands outside her family's tent at Khazir refugee camp outside Irbil, 217 miles (350 kilometers) north of Baghdad, Iraq, June 13, 2014. (AP Photo)
Ukrainian refugee children feed their sister in a kindergarten in the Russian southern city Rostov-on-Don on June 4, 2014. (ANDREY KRONBERG/AFP/Getty Images)
A handout picture released by the United Nations and African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) on April 1, 2011, shows a child with an eye infection brought to a Thai manned UN peacekeepers medical camp in Buru, in western Darfur on March 30, 2011. (ALBERT GONZALEZ FARRAN/AFP/Getty Images)
A Syrian refugee boy sits in a classroom at a Lebanese public school where only Syrian students attend classes in the afternoon, in Kaitaa village in north Lebanon on May 29, 2014. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Pullo families wait after arriving at a centre for displaced Muslims fleeing the anti-balaka militia, in Yaloke, Central African Republic, on May 4, 2014. (ISSOUF SANOGO/AFP/Getty Images)
Rajama sits in the doorway of her home in the Shamalapur Rohingya refugee settlement on April 11, 2014 in Chittagong district, Bangladesh. (Getty Images/Getty Images)
A girl stands at the Catholic mission in Grimari in the center of the Central African Republic on April 16, 2014. (MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images)
Ubah Mohammed Abdule, 33, center, poses for a photograph with her son Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, 8, left, and daughter Neshad Yusuf Ahmed, 5, center, outside her hut in the Shedder refugee camp near the town of Jigjiga, in far eastern Ethiopia on April 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Elias Asmare)
Typhoon survivor Jennifer Dawat, 13, poses a photo with her crayon drawing of the family's happier days in Leyte's Ormoc city, at a temporary shelter in Pasay city, south of Manila, Philippines on Nov. 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
Afghan children, whose family fled their home country to Pakistan, play with a puppy outside their makeshift shelter in a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad on February 10, 2014. (NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)
Zeynep Abdullah, a 14 years-old blind girl, poses for a picture in a park where she lives with her family on Nov. 3, 2013, in Istanbul. (BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images)
A Syrian refugee boy carries a water jug to his family's tent at the Zaatari Refugee Camp, in Mafraq, Jordan on Sept. 8, 2012. (AP Photo/Mohammad Hannon, File)
Displaced Iraqi children take a shower outside their tent at a temporary camp set up to shelter civilians fleeing violence in Iraq's northern Nineveh province on June 13, 2014. (SAFIN HAMED/AFP/Getty Images)
An Afghan refugee girl holding her younger sister stands in an area where Pakistani health workers are searching house to house on the outskirts of Islamabad for children that need vaccination against polio, Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2014. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
Displaced children walk inside a United Nations compound which has become home to thousands of people displaced by the recent fighting in the South Sudanese capital Juba, Dec. 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)