“Military experts often evaluate Kyrgyzstan’s armed forces as being ineffective, which a number of them trace back to living conditions and morale for service members,” OE Watch, the monthly newsletter of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, recently noted.

In February, the Kyrgyz human rights organization Kylym Shamy and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe released a joint report exploring the terrible living conditions and violence Kyrgyz troops endure on a daily basis. The findings are alarming.

Their pay is dismal — a sergeant makes less than $200 a month. Their Soviet-era barracks are crumbling and sometimes lack even light bulbs, leaving them pitch black at night. The food is terrible … when troops are lucky enough to get it. Soldiers and their families regularly go hungry.

Kylym Shamy and OSCE discovered that the military healthcare system is awful. The facilities are falling apart. Sanitation is horrifying. Medicine is hard to get for even the most basic and treatable illnesses — often leading to easily preventable but serious health problems.

They also found that the army carefully hid rampant corruption from the public, and burglaries against civilians by enlisted soldiers.

Some of the ethnic Uzbek respondents — a minority in the 95 percent Kyrgyz military — told the investigators that the military forced them into service after nabbing them in raids. Some were teenagers and students who should have been exempt from conscription.

Fifty service members died between 2010 and October 2013. The report listed the causes of death as 26 suicides, eight murders, six drownings, one “border incident,” four illness deaths and several other “accidents.”

The report went on to recount a series of tragic episodes during the last few years. On Aug. 20, 2012, a border guard from the Karakol detachment shot and killed five people. Authorities tracked down and killed the rogue soldier and after he refused to surrender.

On Feb. 4, 2013, 39 conscripts responsible for guarding the residence of Pres. Almazbek Atambayev suddenly deserted. Later, relatives of the soldiers reported that the reason was abuse by officers.

“The ministry of defense, of course, denied this information, calling the escape of the soldiers childish behavior,” Gulshayyr Abdyrasulova — one of the report’s authors — noted.

On Jan. 17, 2015, a soldier launched an armed attack on the Aykol border detachment on the border with Tajikistan, during which he killed its commander and wounded two soldiers.

The report asserted that bullying is at the heart of many of the deaths — and noted the availability of Internet videos depicting brutal hazing rituals and violence within the ranks.

In particular, the report noted the role of Kyrgyz officers. Military leaders use physical violence and instill a vicious culture of bullying in their subordinates.

Such as the case of Nurlanbek Chyngyz, a soldier who joined the Kyrgyz army in March 2012. He served in the frontier troops and died at a base in Ak Jol.

“I sent my son to the army, two months later he began to tell me that there he was beaten,” his mother Dinara Kydyralieva told Kylym Shamy and OSCE investigators. “When I raised this issue, his superiors told [me] that all is well, and this will not happen again.”

But on Oct. 5, 2012, the army delivered her son’s body — beaten and shot — back to her. “For a year I’m looking for justice, fighting with the courts,” Kydyralieva said. “The guys who shot him, now detained, but they deny their guilt … their parents give money to judges and prosecutors.”

Senior soldiers have a habit of extorting food and money from younger soldiers. The mother of one soldier told investigators a gang of “old timers” regularly forced her son to buy cigarettes, food and vodka for them on his own dime.

She claimed that her son eventually went to the territory store and hanged himself.

The Kyrgyz military recorded 13 cases of military suicides in 2014. The report asserted that though callous officers are typically responsible, only 30 percent of cases go to court.

Overall, the study group interviewed 1,115 conscripts based at 70 installations around the country. They interviewed personnel with the border service, national guard, state penitentiary service and other members of the security forces.

It was a wide sample. But sometimes, what they didn’t find was as telling as what they did. Intimidation still kept troops silent in many places — so there’s a good chance that these problems may be worse than the data suggests.

“There were places where we received blank questionnaires — the soldiers did not even respond,” Abdyrasulova told Russian language outlet Ferghana News.