This is popular front a podcast focus on the very niche and kind of geeky

details of Modern Warfare with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to independent researcher Christopher Schwartz.

He is based in Kyrgyzstan and he's going to be speaking about an incident that happened there

in August which has basically set the country into a very tense situation.

It was a political shootout it wasn't just a random criminal thing and it has deep

implications possibly for the future of Kyrgyzstan.

A place you really hear about in the news or in the media anywhere to be honest.

Just want to say thank you very much to everybody who took part in the popular front 10K campaign. We hear our goal. Thank you so much. There will be updates

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slash popular front. Let's talk about what happened in Kyrgyzstan recently because there was a big arm standoff right I think someone was killed and to be honest no one has really heard about it over here in the West really other than on Twitter like what happened?

Yeah okay so this is a little context first so Kyrgyzstan officially the Kyrgyz republic

is a post-Soviet republic is one of the original 15 member states of the Soviet Union,

and it was one of the reluctant ones to leave, right?

So when Russia finally signed out,

Central Asia was basically kicked to the curb

and they all became independent.

And so Kyrgyzstan is very unusual because its immediate post-independence

leadership embarked upon a path of democratization.

Most of the Central Asian states decided

to go the authoritarian route.

New Pakistan was particularly scary.

...