MANY of the 3m or so Syrian refugees now refer to their hometowns in the past tense. “There was Deraa and now there is no Deraa”, says Safara, a grandmother from the bombed southern Syrian town who now lives in the Jordanian city of Irbid. Now their nationality may become as elusive as their former hometowns. The UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, says that hundreds of thousands of Syrians could become stateless as a result of the brutal three-and-a-half-year war. The number of refugees and the lengthy time they are likely to spend outside Syria, combined with tough nationality laws in host countries, put them at particular risk of adding to the 10m stateless people worldwide.

For many the problem is simply having no papers to prove they are Syrian since over more than three years of war, and as people fled, many identity documents have been lost or destroyed. For others, passports have expired (passports last for only two years for men who have not completed compulsory military service). They can only be replaced or renewed by returning to Syria or by applying at one of the semi-functional embassies abroad. In neighbouring countries, this requires a costly trip to Istanbul, Amman or Beirut, application fees and up to six-months processing time—as well as an uncertain result. Syrians who are wanted by the regime are loth to approach any Syrian authority. Those who have done so remotely say they have had their requests for documentation denied. To make things worse, of late the jihadist group calling itself Islamic State has started to destroy passports and legal records in Syria.

Children are disproportionately affected because many left Syria before ever obtaining a passport or identity card. An estimated 8,000 minors have crossed the borders without an adult, let alone documentation. The case for the some 51,000 Syrian children born in exile is yet more complex. Children born abroad can be recognised as Syrians if their birth is registered by host states, after which they can apply for nationality from the Syrian authorities. Syrian nationality is only conferred if the father is Syrian, so both Jordanian and Lebanese authorities require a valid marriage certificate for the parents before they will register a birth.

But a quarter of refugee families are headed by lone women, since many men have been killed, gone missing or remain in Syria. Refugees who have no nationality documents or expired passports cannot register their marriages outside the country. In addition, many children are born into underage or religious marriages that are not legally recognised. The problem is worsening as Syrian refugees have started to marry off their daughters at a younger age in the hope her new husband can support her. Save the Children, a charity, says one in four Syrian marriages in Jordan is illegal because the bride is underage while a recent UNHCR survey found that more than 75% of refugee babies born in Lebanon had not been properly registered.

None of Syria’s neighbouring states confer citizenship to Syrians simply because they are born on their soil so a refugee cannot easily obtain an alternative nationality. Without valid papers Syrians are denied residency in Lebanon and Turkey.Some undocumented Syrians have been refused entry to Turkey. In Lebanon, many Syrians live in fear of the police and are unable to pass checkpoints, work or rent housing. This has forced some people to make the perilous journey to Syria to obtain official documents, but new policies in Lebanon and Jordan restrict refugees who have returned to Syria from re-entering. A lucrative Syrian passport-forging trade has sprung up in Turkey. Some Syrians have paid huge bribes to Syrian officials to try to obtain documentation. Activists have launched an online campaign demanding that the opposition Syrian National Coalition, the main representative of the opposition, issue passports.

The global stateless population includes "bidoon" a miscellany of nomadic and ethnic groups, many of them Bedouins, never recognised by Gulf states and Rohingya Muslims denied citizenship in Myanmar. Prior to the conflict, Syria was home to an estimated 300,000 stateless people. Some were among the 500,000-strong Palestinian population. (They have struggled to find countries to flee to. Jordan has been criticised several times by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby, for turning back Syrian Palestinians at its borders.) But the majority were from Syria’s 2m Kurds, many of whom were denied citizenshipand, paradoxically, registered as stateless "foreigners" by Syrian authorities. A decree in 2011 enabled some to reapply for citizenship, but others were ineligible or fled before doing so. A survey of Syrian Kurdish refugees in neighbouring Iraqi Kurdistan last year found that 10% were stateless.

UNHCR is encouraging host-countries to simplify registration procedures for Syrian refugees. It suggests these governments ask for fewer documents to prove identity and marriage. It uses cartoons to tell some 3,000 illiterate refugees to safely preserve their legal documents and to register births, deaths and marriages. Every week a civil registry officer visits Jordan’s tightly-regulated Azraq camp, which currently receives around 97% of arrivals to the country from Syria. Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, who runs UNHCR's office in the camp, says thanks to this unregistered births have almost been eliminated. But reaching everyone, especially those living outside camps, is tricky.