Sputnik News Service, Russia Tuesday 4:43 PM UTC Armenia Granted Asylum to 22,000 Refugees From Syria - Foreign Minister YEREVAN, October 24 (Sputnik) - Armenia has granted asylum to more than 22,000 refugees from Syria since the beginning of the conflict in that country, Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian said Tuesday. "From Syria alone Armenia has harbored about 22.000 refugees, on per capita basis making our country the third largest recipient of Syrian refugees in Europe," Nalbandian said at the 2017 OSCE Mediterranean Conference on the refugee problems in Palermo, Italy. This has caused a number of challenges for a country with a population of just 3 million, which has already received hundreds of thousands of refugees from Azerbaijan in the recent past, the minister noted. The 110,000-strong Armenian community in Syria was considered one of the most powerful diasporas before the beginning of the conflict in the country. They mainly lived in Aleppo (60,000 people), Damascus (7,000), Latakia, Kessab and Qamishli. After the outbreak of the Syrian crisis, according to various estimates, more than 90,000 Armenians left Syria. Syria has been engulfed in civil war since 2011, with millions of people having to flee the country. According to the latest United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) data, a total of 5.16 million people left Syria, with over a million of them being hosted in Lebanon, some 600,000 in Jordan and more than three million in Turkey.