Update - US officials: Romania has agreed to accept ten times more refugees than in 2015

Romania and six other European countries have promised to accept at least ten times more refugees than last year, according to US officials cited by AFP, reports local News.ro. Update: Romania's Foreign Affairs Ministry reacted to this information saying that Romania hasn't made any other commitments to take in refugees other than the ones already agreed at an European level. US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday, September 20, that 50 countries would take in 360,000 refugees this year. According to him, the states, including Germany and Canada, promised to double the number from last year. About 21 million refugees had to flee their countries due to conflict or persecution, according to United Nations representatives. Up to nine million people were forced to leave their homes due to the long war in Syria, and some four million left the country. The US has agreed to take in 100,000 refugees in the 2017 fiscal year, which starts on October 1, up from 85,000 in the last year. Romania approved 525 asylum requests in 2015, 250 of which had been filed by refugees, according to the European Union's statistical office Eurostat. In the first five months of this year, Romania registered more than 360 asylum requests, most of the applicants coming from Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan. Some 35 refugees have also been transferred to Romania so far as part of the European refugee redistribution mechanism. Six came from Italy and 29 from Greece. The first 15 arrived in the country in early-March this year. Romania should take in a total of 6,205 refugees over a period of two years, under the refugee resettlement mechanism, which aims to redistribute people from Greece and Italy to the other member states and which was adopted by the European Justice and Home Affairs Council by a qualified majority in 2015. Romania and other Easter European states voted against this mechanism. However, as it turns out, refugees don’t even want to come to Romania and Bulgaria. Moreover, some refugees who had filed for asylum in Romania recently tried to leave country illegally aiming to get to Western Europe. Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com