Anna Arutunyan

It was early morning in Derbent, Dagestan when 38-year-old kiosk-owner Sirazhutdin Shafiyev dropped off his children at daycare. Suddenly, two cars with no license plates blocked his Priora as masked, camouflaged men dragged him out of his car and drove him away. He has not been seen since the September 8 incident.

"We asked police, prosecutors - but they refused to help us," said his mother, Kyzbike. Asked why she thought her son was targeted, she said she didn't know. "They say there is a secret list of 200 people, [devout] Muslims. We are [devout] Muslims, we want to practice our faith. But authorities will not even let us go to the mosque. We are threatened that we will get our legs broken if we go, so we stay home."

Shafiyev's neighbor, Emirali Magomedov, who worked as a local government official, was similarly kidnapped on August 17 and found shot dead two days later.

The men are just two of 29 people snatched off the streets this year in the republic, according to Svetlana Isayeva, head of the Mothers of Dagestan, a human rights organisation that helps families of those who have disappeared. "In such cases, very often the person is found dead, changed into camouflage, with a machinegun next to him," she said. "Then he is officially claimed to be a militant killed in a special operation." Of the 29 who have been kidnapped, 12 were found dead. Isayeva said the number has steadily grown throughout the years.

These are familiar stories in Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya, where violence has spiked dramatically this summer, according to Memorial in Moscow and Washington's Institute for Strategic and International Studies.

One common thread is that separatism and Islamist extremism are no longer the biggest spark igniting the violence. Gone are the days of a battle of independence, when the late warlord Shamil Basayev would commit terror attacks demanding concrete concessions. Today, the Caucasus underground, analysts say, is a loose band of local militant cells under a so-called "Caucasus Emirate" and its self-styled "Emir," Doku Umarov.

A heavy-handed crackdown by the local governments managed to quell the violence for the last three years, only to spurn it back to action as relatives of victims plot their revenge.

Dagestan. Population: 2,500,000. Major ethnic groups: Avars, Dargins, Kumyks, Lezgins

In Dagestan, the latest spate of violence (see infographic) is linked to an impending government shift. President Mukha Aliyev's term expires in February, and the Kremlin will either replace him with someone else, or keep him for a second term.

Isalmagomed Nabiyev, who chairs the republic's Independent Trade Union of Entrepreneurs, said there was a social aspect to the problem, describing it as a "latent civil war" caused by human rights violations.

"There is a large number of people who studied religion in Arab countries and came back. They are not extremists, they accept the rule of law and government, but they are not accepted by the local clergy. These people are called Wahhabites and it is said they should be destroyed."

Because they are ostracised and intimidated, Nabiyev said, these young people feed the ranks of radical, militant groups. "Recently I told the president that these people have been cornered, we need to take urgent action to legalise them, to separate them from the actual extremists."

Ingushetia, population: 470,000. Major ethnic groups: Ingush, Chechens

In neighbouring Ingushetia, different political catalysts fuel the fighting, but the overall situation is the same, rights activists say: young people who hardly care about Islamism or separatism go off to take revenge for their relatives.

It wasn't always like this. Ten years ago, the republic, whose residents are ethnic relatives of the neighboring Chechens, was relatively normal. But in 2002, as it began to be drawn into the Counter-Terrorist Operation to rein in militant elements in Chechnya, the violence gradually escalated. "At first, there were raids on Chechens who lived in Ingushetia," said Timur Akiyev, who heads the local Memorial office. But after the Chechen attack on the Ingush city of Nazran in June 2004, the ensuing crackdown made things worse. "By 2006, the numbers of kidnappings and disappearances started to grow, and the people being arrested and taken were Ingushetians," he said. "It became an Ingush problem, not just a Chechen one."

Most recently, the government of President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who narrowly survived a suicide bombing in June, is taking active measures to establish rule of law and weed out the corruption that ran rampant under his predecessor, Murat Zyazikov.

Instead of brutal campaigns to destroy anyone suspected of terrorism, Yevkurov's policy of dialogue has law enforcement working with village elders, said Alexander Cherkasov, an activist at Memorial who works extensively in the Caucasus. But ironically, it is provoking a backlash from the radicals who want to destabilise the situation.

"Zyazikov, by giving a carte blanche to law enforcement, made it easier for radical groups to recruit new members," Cherkasov said. "But the popularity of Yevkurov is undermining their efforts - and leading to new waves of violence."

Chechnya. Population: 1,100,000. Major ethnic groups: Chechens, Russians

According to Cherkasov, the problem of kidnappings in Chechnya is even more acute. This year, 74 people have been kidnapped. In 2008, there were 42, and 35 in 2007.

"We are back to the situation of 2006, when 187 people were kidnapped," Cherkasov said.

Rights activists, particularly in Dagestan and Ingushetia, have said the local governments have started to take the problem more seriously. Meanwhile, last week the EU Human Rights Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg and Russian ombudsman Vladimir Lukin traveled to Ingushetia and Chechnya, where they met with Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kidnappings were on the agenda, said Kadyrov's spokesperson, Alvi Kerimov. "There are a lot of unmarked graves in the republic, they spoke of establishing a lab to identify the remains," he said.

Officials "expressed concern" over the more than 5,000 missing people in Chechnya. Asked about the rise in violence over the summer, Kerimov was sceptical: "Of course we raised security questions," he said. "I have read these reports, but there is no analysis or definition."