Al Jazeera reports: Six thousand people are fleeing Syria every day as the conflict intensifies and merges with violence in neighbouring Iraq, United Nations officials have said.

The warnings were given on Tuesday at a rare public briefing of the UN’s Security Council in New York

The High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, told the meeting that the organisation had “not seen a refugee outflow escalate at such a frightening rate since the Rwandan genocide almost 20 years ago”.

Ivan Simonovic, the Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, told the meeting that at least 92,901 people were killed in Syria – among them more than 6,500 children – between March 2011 and the end of April 2013.

“The extremely high rate of killings nowadays – approximately 5,000 a month – demonstrates the drastic deterioration of the conflict,” Simonovic told the council meeting.