Over two years ago Syrian families started fleeing the war in their homeland and got as far as Zaatari in Jordan.

What began as a camp has turned into a “city in the sand” housing around 100,000 refugees.

Now Jordan’s government and NGOs have criticised the international community for not doing more to help.

Heinke Veit is an EU Regional Information Officer:

“The great challenge in this crisis is that we don’t know how long it is going to last. We do not know the scale it may reach, we do not know how many refugees we may have, we do not know how many displaced persons will be inside Syria. All these people need help. It is difficult to evaluate their needs, how they change , and how to help people with what we have.”

Although it is the biggest camp, Zaatari is just one of several. In all Jordan has taken in 600,000 Syrians, Lebanon has more than one million, Turkey over 750,000 and Iraq 200,000.

Although the people initially lacked food, water and shelter, now they have secondary more long term needs of education and employment.

Reporting for euronews Charles Salamé said: “The greatest humanitarian crisis of modern times is not receiving the greatest amount of attention from the rest of the world. NGOs say countries bordering Syria are all struggling to cope with a problem which as can be seen in Zaatari shows no sign of going away.”