The International Committee of the Red Cross says the ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan have sparked an immense humanitarian crisis, as tens of thousands of people have been driven from their homes.
"We've seen for ourselves and also heard about pockets of displaced people ranging from several hundred to several thousand in number," Severine Chappaz, the ICRC's deputy head of mission in Kyrgyzstan, said in a statement. "On the Uzbek side of the border, the authorities now say they've registered 75,000 adult refugees, who are mostly women, but that doesn't include their children. It's an immense crisis."
Over the past days, Kyrgyz gangs in several parts of the country attacked ethnic Uzbek homes and shops, killing at least 191 people. International observers say the death toll is higher. The ICRC says "several hundred people" have been killed.
The fighting has sparked a refugee crisis.
Scared Uzbeks have left their homes in the masses, with many fleeing to neighboring Uzbekistan, which opened its borders after scores of refugees arrived there during the past days.
The aid group Save the Children, which has been active in the country since 1992, said more than 300,000 people, among them 200,000 children, are fleeing the violence.
The group says the emergency camps in Uzbekistan are hopelessly overcrowded and refugees are suffering from poor hygiene due to temperatures of more than 100 degrees F.
Individual aid has arrived in Kyrgyzstan but aid groups say there is still a severe shortage of food, water, medication and shelter.
"The people are packed together in the tightest of quarters, there is hardly any food and the situation is becoming more dramatic by the day," Kathrin Wieland, the head of Save the Children's German branch, said in a statement.
Paul Quinn-Judge, Central Asia expert at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels security think tank, said the situation was likely to get worse.
"The reports from the Uzbek communities in Osh and in Jalalabad," in the country's south, are so bloodcurdling that I doubt whether anybody will want to go back in the near future. In fact they'd probably only go back if the Uzbek government forced them to," he told the BBC from Bishkek.
Asian governments including China, Pakistan, India and South Korea have already organized flights to evacuate their citizens out of the violence-torn country.
The situation has been unstable since April, when a bloody coup ousted former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
The country's interim government over the weekend pleaded with Russia to send troops to help stabilize the situation.
Moscow has pledged to provide humanitarian assistance and this past weekend sent additional paratroopers to the country but so far only to protect its interests in Kyrgyzstan. Russia operates several military bases in the country. Kyrgyzstan is also home to a key U.S. air base in Manas, which is used to fly troops and equipment in and out of Afghanistan.
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