OSH, Kyrgyzstan — Gangs of gunmen continued raids on Uzbek enclaves and a refugee crisis grew at the border of this strategically important Central Asian nation on Monday, after four days of violence left swaths of the country’s ethnically mixed south in ruins.
The city of Osh, where mobs marauded for three days, was mostly quiet on Monday morning, and its government buildings appeared to be well-protected.
But Kyrgyz volunteers armed with bats and iron bars — some recently arrived from the north of the country — continued to patrol outlying villages, saying they were defending the country’s south against an Uzbek attempt to seize it.
Thousands of people fleeing the violence massed at Nariman, on the border with Uzbekistan, where Dilmurad Failakov, a doctor from a local hospital, said four newborns had died on Monday morning and dysentery was spreading among the children. Refugees, who were mostly sitting on the ground, said they had seen truckloads of humanitarian aid passing by, but none of them had stopped.
The government of Uzbekistan estimated that 75,000 people were fleeing, and said it had set up refugee camps on its side of the border.
Doctors in Nariman said they were scrambling to treat gunshot wounds and cases of dysentery under circumstances they described as desperate. There was no government presence at the growing camp, and Mr. Failakov, the doctor, said 10 of his patients died because he had no access to medical supplies.
Roughly 70,000 refugees had crossed the border on Sunday, and about 1,000 were able to cross on Monday, said Akmal Khaidarov, another doctor at the site, who estimated that the number of Uzbeks crowding into the border village had grown to 5,000.
Occasional truckloads of people fleeing the violence continued to arrive, including a man who said he had been driving when a gunmen in a bus opened fire on his car, and it flipped over.
