Police and ethnic Uighurs clashed in the western Chinese province of Kashgar, killing 21 people including 15 police.  It’s the deadliest confrontation in the area since 2009.  State media describes the civilian dead as “mobsters”.

Police say the violence occurred in an operation to confiscate knives from a family, and that the police, many of whom were Uighurs themselves, were ambushed by gangsters hiding in the home.

Kashgar lies in the Muslim west, near the borders of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.  While Chinese authorities say they are battling Islamic separatists in the region, some human rights groups claim the many of the Uighurs are merely criminal gangs without a geo-political agenda.

The region has been the site of violence between the dominant ethnic Han Chinese and the Muslim Uighurs in recent years.  It wasn’t always that way; The Uighurs used to be the majority group.  The Han are relatively new settlers in the region as China’s economic expansion spread west.  The groups’ last major clash was in 2009, with a death toll of more than 200 lives lost.