Two Uzbek refugees from the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh wait for permission to cross into Uzbekistan at the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border. Recent ethnic violence displaced 200,000 people. Sergei Grits/AP
A wave of brutal ethnic violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, which officials now admit killed as many as 2,000 people, threatens to turn the mountainous Central Asian nation of 5 million into a failed state. A failed Kyrgyztan could destabilize its neighborhood, offer a target for the region’s Islamist radicals, and provide a haven for narcotraffickers working the opium pipeline from Afghanistan, experts warn.