URL copied to clipboard
Last week, a 12-year-old girl, Madina Rakhmatzhanova, was buried in Kyrgyzstan’s Batken region – one of the youngest victims of the tragic conflict that erupted on the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border at the end of April.
The day before, Rakhmatzhanova had tried to escape shelling by Tajikistani forces, fleeing her village together with her mother and younger sister. But as she did so, she was hit by a shell fragment. Rakhmatzhanova died before reaching hospital.
In this mountainous corner of Central Asia, conflicts between residents, and border guards, flare up from time to time over disputed borders between the two states. But last week’s conflict was the largest in recent years, with dozens of people killed and injured, and hundreds left homeless.