The screams were coming from the back of the heavy green lorry stopped on the side of Road 47. Two women in black niqabs stood in the trailer, crying out from behind the black veils which hid their faces.

One held a bundled-up green and blue blanket. It was only when she leaned over the edge of the truck that a pale face could be seen in the blanket folds. The ten-month-old girl was named Habiba. She died in the back of the lorry the day before, the women said.

The girl’s mother, a jihadist’s wife from the suburbs of Aleppo, cradled her body all night as the convoy of trucks rumbled towards the Kurdish-run refugee camp where she would be buried.

Even as they mourned over Habiba, the women said they were afraid for her two-year-old brother, who lay weakly a few feet from his dead sister. “Look how thin his legs are, he can’t stand up. He’s going to die if he stays like this.”

Habiba and around 80 other children have died in less than two months amid the chaos of the Islamic State’s collapse in eastern Syria, according to the UN. Hypothermia was the main killer.