Refugees sit behind a barred window at a shelter for Syrian refugees in Bulgaria, Aug. 28, 2013. the small EU state finds it hard to cope with an ever rising number of Syrians fleeing conflict at home. Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Syrian-Kurdish refugees sit outside tents provided by the UNHCR at the Quru Gusik refugee camp, 20 kilometres east of Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq on Thursday. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

A female Syrian-Kurdish refugee sits next to her sleeping daughter at the Quru Gusik refugee camp, 20 kilometres east of Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq on Thursday. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

Men stand at a stall in an alley of the Quru Gusik refugee camp that hosts Syrian-Kurdish refugees, Aug. 27, 2013. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

A Syrian-Kurdish man pours a cup of tea at the Quru Gusik refugee camp, near Arbil, Iraq on Thursday. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

Syrian-Kurdish refugees walk in an alley of the Quru Gusik refugee camp, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, on Aug. 27, 2013. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

Syrian-Kurdish refugee families queue to get food at the Quru Gusik refugee camp, near Arbil, Iraq on Thursday. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

Syrian-Kurdish refugee children sit in a concrete block at the Quru Gusik refugee camp, near Arbil, Iraq, on Tuesday. Safin Hamed/AFP/Getty Images

Syrian refugees arrive at Turkey from Cilvegozu crossing gate at Reyhanli, in Antakya, on Friday. Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

A child pulls a suitcase as Syrian refugees arrive in Turkey at the Cilvegozu crossing gate of Reyhanli, in Hatay, on Saturday. Bulent Kilic AFP/Getty Images

Syrian refugees greet each other at the Turkish Cilvegozu gate border with Syria, Friday, Aug. 30, 2013. Gregorio Borgia/AP

Syrian refugees, who fled the violence in Syria, walk at a new refugee camp in the outskirts of the city of Arbil in Iraq's Kurdistan region Aug. 26, 2013. Azad Lashkari/Reuters

The number of refugees in Syria has surpassed the 2 million mark, the United Nations said Tuesday, in the ever worsening humanitarian crisis that has resulted from the two-year-old Syrian civil war. Almost one-third of the country's population has been uprooted, including internal displacement.

"Syria has become the great tragedy of this century -- a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history," said António Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Guterres said the number of refugees could reach 3 million by year's end.

The tide of children, women and men crossing borders has risen almost ten-fold over the past 12 months, figures from the U.N. refugee agency showed.

The 2 million refugees that the U.N. now documents, which includes more than 1 million children, is placing a huge strain on the countries hosting them. At the end of August, some 716,000 Syrian refugees were registered or in the process of being registered in Lebanon, 515,000 in Jordan, 460,000 in Turkey, 168,000 in Iraq and 110,000 in Egypt, according to the agency's numbers.

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Ministers from Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey -- the four main hosts of Syrian refugees -- are due to meet officials from the agency in Geneva Wednesday to work out ways to raise more international aid.

Despite extensive pledges to the U.N. from donor nations to combat the refugee crisis, the actual money has been slow to come in and remains inadequate according to some.

"One of the biggest problems remains the lack of funding for the U.N.'s efforts," Dawn Chatty, director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera.

Of the $1.1 billion that the U.N. refugee agency requested in 2013, it has received less than half, with the U.S. having given 40 percent of that $548 million.