Kenya moves to shut down Dadaab, the world's biggest refugee camp

2016-05-11T18:25:00-04:00

Kenya has vowed to close the world’s biggest refugee camp within a year and send hundreds of thousands of Somalis back to their war-torn homeland or on to other countries, a plan decried by aid and human rights groups as dangerous, illegal and impractical. Kenya says it needs to close the sprawling Dadaab camp, home to 330,000 mostly Somali refugees, to protect the country’s security after a string of terror attacks by al-Shabaab.

With most of Europe and the Middle East grappling with an unprecedented refugee crisis, it's easy to lose sight of the millions of other displaced peoples around the world. But the largest population of refugees isn't in Germany, Sweden, or France.

Rather, with a population of 329,811 refugees, primarily Somali, the refugee camp complex in Dadaab, Kenya is the largest in the world. Now, the Kenyan government is moving to shut it down.

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Kenya moves to shut down Dadaab, the world's biggest refugee camp