Issue 10 · November 2, 2026 · Libera Mondo Newsletter

El Fasher nearly empty a year after RSF capture

A year after the Rapid Support Forces captured El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, satellite imagery shows almost no civilian life outside an area of about five square kilometers, according to a report by Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, published October 28 and summarized by Dabanga. The city and its camps, including Zamzam and Abu Shouk, held an estimated one to two million people before the siege began in April 2024. Eight of nine major markets show no activity. At five hospitals, researchers found excavation and burning sites, with material consistent with human remains burned at several. A 75-kilometer trench and earth barrier surrounds the city. The researchers call for an international investigation.

Peru delays protection for the Mashco Piro

Peru’s multisectoral commission on peoples in isolation and initial contact ended its 43rd session on October 23 without deciding the status of the Madre de Dios Territorial Reserve, home to the Mashco Piro, a people living in isolation, EarthRights International reported on October 29. Nine of the commission’s 16 members voted to add an Environment Ministry proposal to update the 2016 study that had confirmed the Mashco Piro’s presence beyond the reserve’s limits and backed extending it. That reopens a process the state approved a decade ago. The session also left unresolved the logging concessions inside the proposed extension. At a hearing before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Peru had said the commission would take a final decision at this session. Before the session, AIDESEP and the Madre de Dios federation FENAMAD said more than 200 kilometers of logging roads had been built in the area since 2016.

Taliban pressure on Hazara township continues

Taliban Justice Ministry teams are still searching homes in Omid Sabz, a mainly Hazara and Shia township in western Kabul, residents told Hasht-e Subh on October 24. They say armed men enter homes when the men of the household are out, list belongings room by room, and in one case took a resident’s wife’s fingerprints and told her she must now pay rent for her own home. The Taliban set rent at 4,000 afghanis per room, with six months owed in arrears, after a Taliban court declared the land state property in April. Residents’ representatives who protested have been detained. On October 29 a homeowner told Etilaatroz that armed men from the Justice Ministry had given him one day to leave.

China jails Tibetan former abbot for five years

Chinese authorities have sentenced Lobsang Tenpa, also known as Tenpa Gyatso, a former abbot of Ragya Monastery in Golog, in the Tibetan region of Amdo (Qinghai Province), to five years in prison, the Dharamsala-based Tibet Times reported on October 17, citing a source inside Tibet. He was sentenced around October 5 and moved to a prison in Xining. Police had sealed his quarters on August 5 and reportedly found portraits of the Dalai Lama and of the monastery’s exiled head lama, and a USB drive of the Dalai Lama’s teachings. In May 2025 he was held for several months after leading long-life prayers for the Dalai Lama. The charges, the court and whether he had a lawyer are unknown. Tibet Watch reports that two Tibetan-language schools in the area have also been closed.

Pará law behind Indigenous land invasion

A Mongabay investigation published October 19 traces how a Pará state law opened the way for about 500 people to occupy the Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Land, home to the isolated Igarapé Ipiaçava people. The law, creating the 142,400-hectare Bacajaí Environmental Protection Area over the whole Indigenous land, was proposed by state legislator Francisco “Torrinho” Torres, a rancher with millions in environmental fines, and passed unanimously. With Instituto Dados, Mongabay found that 97% of the 213 illegal land claims registered inside the territory since 2015 are for medium or large properties. INPE data show fire alerts rose from zero in August to 23 by October 13. The National Force ordered in by a federal court on August 26 had still not arrived.

Russia fines churches over a single Bible

Russian courts are fining churches, pastors and a researcher under the law on “undesirable organizations,” Forum 18 reported on October 29. A Moscow court fined Golgotha Baptist church 50,000 rubles and its pastor, Pyotr Mitskevich, 20,000 rubles over one illustrated New Testament published by Mission Eurasia, a US Protestant mission added to the banned list in May. A witness said the book was kept in the pastor’s locked office. In Vladimir, two pastors were fined 20,000 rubles each over Mission Eurasia books and booklets. A Moscow Region court fined Olga Sibiryova, a religious freedom researcher at the Sova Center, the maximum 15,000 rubles because a banned foreign alliance had allegedly cited her public reports; Sova says neither ever had contact with it. A repeat offense can bring up to four years in prison. More than 20 religious organizations are on the list.

Egypt releases six young Copts

Egypt’s Supreme State Security Prosecution ordered the release without bail of six young Coptic Christians held over a TikTok video, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) said on October 26; release was complete for all six. The young men, one under 18, from Samalout district in Minya, had reenacted a scene from the 2018 comedy Khalawis in which prisoners try to pray without knowing the verses. They were handed to police on October 6 and detained on October 10, as Issue 9 reported. Prosecutors ordered their release on October 19. The case, No. 8430 of 2026, remains open on charges including offending a religion. The local diocese had issued a formal apology to the village’s Muslim residents.