Russia's security forces in its North Caucasus region are running "death squads" whose brutal tactics in combating an Islamist insurgency are fuelling a new civil war, leading rights groups said Wednesday.

"We can describe their method as 'death squads'. We shoudn't be afraid of using this term because they kill civilians and push the Caucasus toward war," prominent rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, who heads the organisaton For Human Rights, told journalists in Moscow.

"The recent events in the North Caucasus show that the policy of the Russian authorities is at a dead end."
Russian rights group Memorial, which tracks kidnappings in the turbulent Caucasus, called Wednesday's press conference to raise alarm over the rise this year in such cases, which the group blames on federal security forces.

Kidnapping
According to their tally, 79 people were victims of kidnapping in Chechnya in the first six months of 2009.
Neighbouring Dagestan has seen 25 kidnappings since February, the group said, and in 12 of those cases the kidnapping victims were murdered.

"The security forces are out of control," said Memorial's Alexander Cherkasov.

"Clandestine fighters exist and are active but the current anti-terror policy simply fuels the problem."

Young men in the region are systematically targeted by the police and the security forces, which in turn makes them more susceptible to recruitment by rebel groups, Cherkasov added.

"New civil war"
Moscow has lost control and the North Caucasus are now in the grip of a new civil war, said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the widely respected 82-year-old head of the Moscow Helsinki Group.

"What we see now in all these (Caucasus) republics is a civil war between the security forces and the clandestine fighters, and between the security forces and the local population," she told reporters.

"In the end, we will lose the North Caucasus. The Russian president doesn't wish this, of course, but he has no control over his own security forces."

Insurgency
Violence has spiked throughout Russia's overwhelmingly Muslim Northern Caucasus over the last months as Islamist militants wage a low-level insurgency against the pro-Kremlin local authorities.

Since June alone, 260 people at least have been killed in clashes between security forces and militants and suicide bombings, according to an AFP tally based on official reports.
(AFP)