Barely alive after IS, Syrian babies haunted by malnutrition They survived the Islamic State group's crumbling "caliphate" by a thread, but skeletal babies streaming into a displacement camp in al-Hol in northeastern Syria now face a race against malnutrition. Medics at Al-Hol, which has been flooded with more than 25,000 displaced people in recent weeks as military operations ramped up, do not have the capacity to treat severely malnourished children and must send them on to hospitals in the city of Hasakeh an hour away.