ISIS terrorists massacred 52 people yesterday during a failed counteroffensive in Syria’s central Hama province.

The official Sana news agency said 52 residents had been killed and 45 injured when the death cult’s fighters stormed the village of Aqarab al-Safiyeh east of the town of Salamiyeh.

The chief of the National Hospital in Salamiyeh, Dr Noufal Safar, said the hospital received 52 bodies, including 11 women and 17 children. He said some of them had been beheaded and others had their limbs amputated.

Army troops and National Defence Forces reservists drove the attackers from the village and others targeted by Isis in its latest bid to cut the main supply road to Aleppo.

Elsewhere, the army and Kurdish guerillas continued to hammer the jihadist group.

On Wednesday night, troops liberated at least nine villages in the east of Aleppo province, where they are trying to break through to the town of Maskanah and into Raqqa province further down the Euphrates valley.

Further east, the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurdish YPG, took two more villages north of the Isis stronghold of Raqqa yesterday.

At talks in Geneva, UN envoy Staffan de Mistura said discussions had begun on a “constitutional process” towards peace with Westernbacked insurgent groups.

Syrian delegation leader Bashar al-Ja’afari said the process was the government’s “own initiative,” but he insisted that Damascus “will not accept any interference.”

The government previously amended the constitution in 2012 in an unsuccessful bid to end the war.

On Wednesday, the Syria Direct website claimed that five Free Syrian Army (FSA) members it had spoken to this week had confirmed rumours that US troops supporting the rebel FSA had crossed the Jordanian border into Syria.

The insurgents said the plan was to seize eastern Deir Ezzor province from Isis before the current Syrian army offensive can lift the four-year siege of the provincial capital.

But the army is pouring thousands of troops into the east of Rif Dimashq province to support its push towards the at-Tanf border crossing with Iraq, which threatens to cut off the FSA land grab.

If true, the Syria Direct report indicates that White House pledges last week and on Monday to work with Syria’s allies Russia and Iran were two-faced — or that the Pentagon remains a law unto itself in Syria.