LAUSR

### Summary box With the world in the grip of COVID-19 pandemic other emergencies risk drifting to the back of people’s minds. One long-standing emergency is the war and conflict in Syria, which has claimed at least 500 000 lives and left an estimated 11 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.1 2 In the Northwest of the country, in the Idlib and Northern Aleppo governorates, four million people, of which two-thirds are displaced from other parts of Syria, are currently in the midst of a humanitarian crisis due to a military campaign by Syrian and Russian government forces.3 In the Northeast, the plight of many in detention and refugee or internally displaced people (IDP) camps appears forgotten. To compound this complex situation further, COVID-19 has now also arrived in Syria, including in the Northeast. At the time of writing, in Syria, 124 cases and 6 deaths have been reported.4 5 Here, I aim to describe the situation in one of the refugee/IDP camps in Northeast Syria, the Al Hol camp, based on my experiences there from May to August 2019 as an epidemiologist with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), to raise awareness about the health and humanitarian situation. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) occupied large parts of Syria and Iraq and terrorised hundreds of thousands of …