WHEN Arsen Butayev was seized on a street in broad daylight last month and held captive with four other men, including his younger brother, he must have known a terrible fate awaited them. The witnesses to his abduction knew it too. Nobody intervened.

Butayev, 23, and his comrades had fallen into the hands of a death squad operated by the security services in Dagestan, a small, mountainous republic of 3m souls riven by growing conflict in the southernmost part of Russia.

In Dagestan — it means “the country of mountains” — such abductions follow a pattern as grim as it is familiar. The men were bundled away at gunpoint in the capital, Makhachkala. First their heads were covered with hoods. Then they were driven to an interrogation centre to be tortured as suspected Islamic militants.

They were beaten. One was subjected to a mock hanging, another to electric shocks. Finally, like other young men before them, they were taken to a wood, bruised, bewildered and terrified.

There, they were bound with duct tape and placed inside a car that had been wired with explosives and doused in petrol. Their captors sprayed chloroform into their hoods and abruptly departed. The men, who have never been charged with any crime, were left waiting to be blown to bits.

It is usual for the security forces to claim that terrorist bombers have inadvertently triggered their device before they were able to plant it.

On this occasion, however, Butayev and his friend Islam Askerov, 21, were not rendered helpless by the chloroform. They freed themselves, removed the explosives and placed them in a nearby field. But they were unable to wake the rest of the group before the death squad returned. They fled, leaving Butayev’s 22-year-old brother Artur and the other two behind. Days later, the three men were found dead at another spot, their bodies charred. The survivors are still hiding.

Their ordeal is described in witness statements which suggest that local police, backed by Russian special forces, are behind the death squads.

The incident illustrates the brutality of an underground war that is being waged in the northern Caucasus region, encompassing Chechnya and its neighbouring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan.

On one side are Muslim extremists who want to break away from Moscow’s rule and set up an Islamic state. On the other are the Kremlin-backed forces hell-bent on stopping them. Caught in the middle are countless civilians.

It is unreported in Russia and virtually unnoticed by the rest of the world. Yet just five months after the long war in Chechnya was officially declared to be at an end, the northern Caucasus has seen a big upsurge in violence. Five hundred people have been killed so far this year, double last year’s toll. It has become the Kremlin’s most pressing problem after the economic crisis.

In Chechnya itself, where security forces commanded by its 32-year-old president, Ramzan Kadyrov, have been accused of numerous atrocities, there have been nearly 90 abductions this year. The targets included Natalia Estemirova, a leading human rights campaigner who was kidnapped and murdered in July.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president