UN agency praises pledges to resettle over 100,000 refugees, but urges more help to curb rampant displacement crisis.

Twenty-eight countries have agreed to take in more than 100,000 refugees from Syria, doubling the number of migrants to whom they were initially offering asylum, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has said.

Antonio Guterres, the head of the UN agency, said on Tuesday that he was pleased with the new pledges but that much more help was needed to curb the rampant displacement crisis in Syria.

"We estimate [there] will be more than 100,000 opportunities for resettlement and humanitarian admission," Guterres told reporters on Tuesday after a high-level pledging conference in Geneva.

He said 28 countries had expressed solidarity with Syrians who fled their war-ravaged country, and with neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, which are struggling to cope with a bulk of the refugees totalling in the millions.

The world has a debt of gratitude to the neighbouring countries that probably we will never be able to fully pay or to fully express," Guterres old delegates.

There was no clear overview over which countries had pledged what, but Guterres hailed the roles played by Germany, Sweden and the United States in the resettlement programme.

However, the total pledges to help refugees still fall short of a UNHCR's target and the numbers experts say are necessary.

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