ISIS savages execute and then dismember dozens of women and children

ISIS savages have executed and then dismembered dozens of women and children amid fears the terror group is plotting a wave of massacres in Shiite villages.

Extremists beheaded some prisoners and used bricks to kill children before hacking off their limbs during horrific raids in Hama province in central Syria.

More than 50 were killed during clashes including at least 24 women and children in villages where many residents belong to the Ismaili branch of Shiite Islam.

It has raised fears of a new atrocities mirroring those ISIS carried out in other minority communities - including Yazidi areas - in Syria and Iraq.

  The villages, Aqareb and Al-Mabujeh, are located near the town of Salamiyeh and the highway that links the capital, Damascus, to the northern city of Aleppo.

The two villages are home to members of several religious minority sects, and Al-Mabujeh has been targeted by IS before.

In March 2015, the group killed dozens of people and kidnapped some 50 civilians in an attack there.

Media reports and doctors in the area said some of those killed in the latest raid were beheaded and others dismembered. 

At least three of the civilians, a man and his two children, were executed with knives, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

ISIS extremists are notorious for mutilating bodies of their adversaries, particularly members of other sects than Sunni Islam.

The militants stormed homes in the southern part of Aqareb al-Safi village before government forces pushed them back into the desert, the state news agency SANA reported.

The head of the National Hospital in Salamiyeh, Dr. Noufal Safar, said it received 52 bodies, including 11 women and 17 children.

Some of the bodies were badly mutilated, beheaded or had their limbs severed but 'most appear to have died as a result of gunfire,' Safar told The Associated Press by telephone.

Rami Razzouk, a coroner at the hospital who inspected the bodies, said those of children were brought in mostly dismembered while the men had died from shelling or heavy machine-gun fire. 

He said at least nine children were beaten on the head with heavy objects such as bricks or stones. 

The Syrian Observatory also said that 52 people were killed in the fighting, with the dead including 15 civilians, 27 Syrian soldiers and 10 unidentified people.

Razzouk said 120 people were wounded; SANA said 40 were wounded.

The ISIS-linked Aamaq news agency said the militants captured villages of Aqareb al-Safi and Mabouja. It identified residents as members of Assad's Alawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam. The Sunni extremists view Shiites as apostates deserving of death.

ISIS has massacred thousands of Shiites and other opponents in Syria and Iraq, often boasting about the killings and circulating photos and videos of them online. 

Aamaq claimed that 100 Syrian troops and pro-government gunmen were killed in the fighting.

'Dozens of people are missing but it is not clear if they were kidnapped' by IS, the Observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said.