ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- In the early morning hours of September 16, Elzada Mannanova, a 15-year-old Kyrgyz citizen, was killed amid shelling by Tajik forces as she fled from her home village of Dostuk.
Her father, Malik Mannanov, told RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service that he buried his daughter in the village of Margun in haste.
'Everyone was running from the projectiles,' recalled Mannanov, one of the some 140,000 Kyrgyz forced during the hostilities from villages in the southwestern region of Batken, some of whom used a corridor opened by neighboring Uzbekistan.
It was a tragic story heard far too often on both sides of the border as civilians suffered dozens of casualties and damage to their property.
Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Republished with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Washington DC 20036
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