GENEVA, July 12 (Reuters) - Chad is failing to protect its civilians from armed groups who kill, mutilate and rape in the conflict stricken central African country, an international refugee body said.

In a report released late on Wednesday, the Norwegian Refugee Council said the estimated 172,600 people who have been uprooted by fighting in eastern Chad over the past two years often lack access to water, food and health care.

"The government has an obligation to ensure security and address the root causes of the inter-ethnic violence, to ensure that the displaced people can return to their areas of origin," its secretary-general, Tomas Colin Archer, said in a statement.

In a worsening crisis, some 120,000 Chadians have in the past seven months fled fighting between the government and rebel groups, cross-border raids by militias from Sudan's Darfur region and spiralling inter-communal violence, the report found.

Violations of humanitarian law and human rights have been committed in eastern Chad by Sudanese and Chadian rebels and militia groups, and sometimes by soldiers of the Chadian National Army ANT, according to the group's Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

"Targeted attacks against civilians, mainly women and children and often in internally-displaced persons sites, have included arbitrary killings, mutilations and rape," it said, adding that victims had sometimes been burned alive.

Crimes had been committed on all sides with total impunity, it added. The crimes included the recruitment of child soldiers.

Aid workers have been subjected to attacks, threats and the theft of their vehicles, according to the report.

The United Nations said this week that violence had also escalated in Darfur since January, throwing another 160,000 people out of their homes.

Some 200,000 people are estimated to have died in that conflict, which began in 2003 when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms after accusing the Khartoum government of neglect.

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