Islamic State kills at least 50 as fighting with Syrian army rages near highway

The Islamic State group killed more than 50 people in an attack on two government-held villages in central Syria's Hama province on Thursday, a monitor said.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack on the villages of Aqareb and Al-Mabujeh killed at least 15 civilians and 27 pro-government fighters.

It said another 10 bodies were yet to be identified as government fighters or local residents.

The militants broke into villagers' houses at dawn, the government-run SANA news agency said.

Bodies found mutilated

Dead bodies were found with limbs cut off, or beheaded, SANA added, quoting a local medical official. 

IS also lost 15 fighters in the dawn attack on the two villages in the east of the province, the monitor said.

The militant group has lost large swathes of territory recently in Syria after expanding rapidly in 2014 and 2015, and is under assault from a US-backed coalition of Arab and Kurdish militias as well as by the Syrian army, backed by Russia.

However, it still mounts occasional counter attacks including a swift advance in December to capture Palmyra, which it held for several weeks before the army retook the city.

The insurgents said on a social media feed it had captured the village of Aqareb, but SANA reported that the attack had been repulsed.

SANA earlier said IS fighters had killed 20 people in the village before the army and allied militia drove them away. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that clashes were still going on there and in the village of al-Saboura.

Ismaili sect targeted?

Many of the people who live in that part of Syria belong to the Ismaili sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam, and would be regarded by IS as infidels. In 2015, IS killed 46 civilians in a nearby town, the Observatory said.

The Observatory, a Britain-based monitor of the war, said that at least 15 of those killed were civilians, five of them children, and that three of them died in execution-style killings.

The villages are north of al-Salamiya, close to the only road still useable between Aleppo and other parts of Syria held by the government.

The army and its allies hold the road and a small strip of land on each side, with Islamic State controlling the eastern area and Syrian rebel groups, including hardline Islamists, the western area.

The minotor said the attack was the most violent so far this year by IS on the road.

Syria's civil war began in 2011 after mass protests against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad and has killed hundreds of thousands of people, driven half the country's population from their homes and dragged in world powers.