Kyrgyzstan announced on Sunday that 12 more people had been killed in border clashes with Tajikistan this week, amid an outbreak of fighting between the Central Asian countries.

Sunday’s statement means the current death toll on the Kyrgyzstan side is at least 36, while Tajikistan has not provided exact figures of its dead.

Clashes erupted around the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border on Friday, with both sides accusing one another of using tanks, mortars, rocket artillery and drones, at times against civilian settlements. …

The decades-long fighting on the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border is set against a backdrop of the chaotic dissolution of the USSR, which both countries were in, and tensions over resource access.