The conflict in Chechnya is triggering a chain reaction of outrage across the North Caucasus, analysts warned Thursday, although it is too soon to speak of the outbreak of another Caucasus War.


That was the claim made Thursday by Musa Shanibov, leader of the confederation of the peoples of the Caucasus, which brings together all the ethnic groups in the region.


"A new Caucasus war has begun," Shanibov said.


Zhantemir Gubachikov, deputy chairman of the confederation, warned that Russia's crackdown on Chechnya's independence bid "will cause the other nationalities to turn away from Russia."


While the Chechens were the only people in the region who were solidly behind independence, he added, economic decline had already eroded support for Moscow in other regions as well and could easily turn into opposition.


The confederation has set up eight recruitment points across the North Caucasus and its leaders said Wednesday that up to 800 volunteers had already joined.


"What is happening now will unite everybody," said Marie Broxup, a London-based specialist on the North Caucasus.


"There is solidarity between one mountain people and another," Ingushetia's president, Ruslan Aushev warned at a press conference in Moscow on Thursday. "How it develops depends on the federal authorities."


The first signs suggest that, while the peoples of the western Caucasus are likely to protest peacefully, Chechnya's immediate neighbors can be expected to come to the aid of Grozny.


Sunday the Chechens' ethnic kin, the Ingush, blocked the Russian advance into Chechnya while angry locals in Dagestan to the east took Russian soldiers hostage.


"Whether we want it or not Ingushetia is being dragged into this conflict," Aushev said.


Aushev who has tried to stay out of the Chechen conflict is suing Defense Minister Pavel Grachev for accusing him of "declaring war on Russia." Five Ingush civilians, including the republic's minister of health, died while impeding Russian columns headed for Chechnya.


The Chechens and Ingush are of the same ethnic group, the Vainakh, and were deported together into Central Asia in 1944. They shared the same republic, Chechen-Ingushetia, until Chechnya declared unilateral independence in 1991 and Ingushetia stayed inside the federation.


Dagestan is Russia's most complex ethnic mosaic with more than 30 nationalities. It has stayed mainly quiet amidst the other conflagrations in the Caucasus. But Broxup said that the conflict in Chechnya might ignite the republic.


"Dagestan will be the most involved," she said.


The Chechens and the Avars, Dagestan's main ethnic group, formed the core of resistance to the tsarist armies in the 18th and 19th centuries.


Sheikh Mansur, who first led resistance to Catherine the Great's armies in 1785, was a Chechen and his picture still hangs on Dudayev's wall.


The greatest hero of the Caucasian tribes was Imam Shamil, an Avar, who conducted a partisan war against the Russians for almost 30 years until he was finally captured in 1859.


General Alexei Yermolov, who fought Shamil, founded the city of Grozny in 1818, giving it its ominous name, which means "cruel" or "terrible" in English. He used it as a fortress to launch attacks on the rebels.


A similar pattern might repeat itself if the Russians take a long time to subdue Chechnya. The Chechens claim they have weapons stored in the mountains in the south of the republic ready to fight a partisan war in the tradition of their ancestors.


The Russians, although equipped with modern weaponry, would be exposed as they travelled in the countryside and in the mountains, just as they have been on the roads to Grozny.


Broxup said that years of Soviet rule had done little to persuade the mountain people that they are part of Russia.


"What is Russified are the cities, and in Dagestan that means only Makhachkala," she said of the North Caucasus region. "Once you get outside the cities into the mountains, the heart of the country, there has been very little Russification."


She said she expected "sabotage, non-cooperation, passive resistance, anything" from local people, who could disrupt Russian military supply lines into Chechnya.