FOR the past year Lebanese security forces have been making life increasingly hard for refugees from Syria, particularly males of military age. The state news agency has recently run articles under headlines such as “53 Syrians arrested in Zahle,” “Army raids Syrian refugee camp in al-Rahma” and “Army arrests 58 Syrians in Bar Elias”—referring to places close to the border with Syria. The charges range from “belonging to a terrorist group” to letting residency papers expire. Some refugees say that those arrested are never heard from again. Since a security crackdown began last year after a succession of car-bombings in Lebanon was blamed on Syrian jihadists, around 2,000 Syrians are thought to have been detained.

For decades Syrians and Lebanese could cross the frontier with only a national identity card, sometimes needing not even that. But now Syrians must be sponsored by a Lebanese citizen or pay $200 for a six-month residency permit, requirements that many refugees arriving with virtually nothing find hard to meet.

All the same, they have flooded in. Syrians now make up a third of Lebanon’s population, which was 4m before the war, making it the country with the largest proportion of refugees in the world. The UN’s High Commission for Refugees has registered more than 1.1m. The true number may be almost twice as big.

On May 6th the UN agency stopped registering new refugees on orders from the Lebanese government, which has anyway never let refugee camps be officially set up, mindful of the trouble caused in the past by Palestinian ones that became hotbeds of militancy and were blamed by many for stoking the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. The authorities in dozens of Lebanese towns have imposed curfews.

At the Masnaa border crossing on the road between Beirut and Damascus, the two countries’ capitals, many Syrians whose residency permits have expired are tricked into leaving, falsely assured that they can get another stamp and walk back in. In fact, they are being deported. Once in no-man’s land many try to bribe their way back. Nadim Houry, Beirut director of Human Rights Watch, a monitoring outfit, says that the high residency fees and blurred guidelines confuse the refugees. “In effect, more Syrians are being pushed into losing their legal status,” he says.

After Lebanese soldiers recently raided a camp outside Bar Elias, a town near the border, hundreds of Syrian men disappeared for fear of arrest. “The army always comes before dawn and kicks our doors in,” says Umm Saleh, whose husband was arrested two weeks ago. He has not been heard from since.