MOSCOW, Sept 3 (AFP) - The Caucasus, scene of a dramatic hostage crisis that ended Friday with more than 100 dead, is the turbulent home to scores of ethnic and religious groupings prone to regular outbreaks of violence.
The mountainous region, roughly the size of California, forms a natural crossroads between east and west, north and south and currently comprises three newly independent states -- Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia -- along with part of the regional superpower, Russia.
The seven Russian republics in the region are themselves highly diverse, including strife-torn Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Karachai-Cherkessia, Adygeya and Kabardino-Balkaria.
Dagestan alone, wedged between the Caspian Sea and Chechnya, is inhabited by 30 nationalities, each with its own language and customs.
Many of the region's languages are of Indo-European or Turkic origin, others are indigenous.
Islam is well-established in the Caucasus, notably in Azerbaijan and several of the Russian republics, but Orthodox Christianity in its Russian, Georgian and Armenian variants is also widespread.
Its key position made the Caucasus a target for regional empires including those of the Ottomans and Persia.
More recently the Russians have dominated the region, and many of the conflicts of the past decade have been exacerbated by administrative demarcations decided during the Soviet era and the wholesale deportations ordered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during World War II.
Nationalist sentiment among the rugged, fiercely independent mountain peoples was never entirely extinguished, and aspirations to self-rule contributed significantly to the break-up of the Soviet Union.
The first out-and-out conflict erupted in the late 1980s between Armenians and Azeris scrapping over the remote enclave of Nagorno Karabakh, administratively part of Azerbaijan but inhabited mainly by Armenians.
That conflict, like others that have broken out subsequently, has still not been resolved.
In 1992, in the months following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, South Ossetia, part of Georgia, fought a brief war with government forces to claim independence from Tbilisi, while Christian North Ossetia, part of Russia, battled with Muslim Ingushetia over a territorial claim.
The same year, Georgia's western Abkhazia region -- with suspected Russian support -- fought a year-long separatist war that won de facto independence at a cost of thousands of dead and a ruined economy.
In December 1994 Russian president Boris Yeltsin poured troops into Chechnya to put down a separatist insurgency headed by Dzhokhar Dudayev. Less than two years later he was forced to withdraw the troops, leaving rebel leaders in control.
Chechnya's de facto independence, marked by chaos and warlordism, lasted less than three years as an incursion by rebels from Chechnya into Dagestan triggered a further invasion by Russian troops, ordered this time by Yeltsin's prime minister and heir apparent Vladimir Putin.
Putin has made frequent claims since then to have stabilised the situation in Chechnya, usually finding them belied by events.
The Caucasus region, particularly its Russian republics, are also dogged by lawlessness despite -- some say because of -- the presence of Russian troops, with oil-trafficking, clan warfare and hostage-taking rampant.