Issue 7 · September 12, 2026 · Libera Mondo Newsletter

Invaders occupy land of isolated Amazon people

About 500 people have occupied the Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Land in Pará, Brazil, 142,400 hectares held for the Igarapé Ipiaçava, who live in voluntary isolation. The occupation began on August 13, the day after Pará published a state law creating a protected area that overlaps the territory entirely, and grew from roughly 200 people to about 500 by August 24, with camps, cattle, and marked-out plots. A federal court struck the state law down as unconstitutional on August 26 and ordered the federal government and Funai, the Indigenous affairs agency, to send the National Public Security Force within 48 hours. Mongabay reports that the deadline passed with no deployment.

Taliban seize a large Kabul Shia seminary

Taliban forces entered the Khatam al-Nabieen complex in Kabul on September 5, one of the city’s largest Shia seminaries, and ordered teachers and students out. Twenty-eight were detained; four were released and 24 are still held. The next day the Taliban arrested three Shia scholars, Sufi Gardizi, Sayed Hassan Sharifi Balkhabi, and Mohammad Hossein Sangardoost, ahead of a meeting called to press for the detainees’ release. On September 7 students were given until 10 a.m. to go and were cleared out by the afternoon. The Ministry of Justice says the complex stands on state land; the seminary says it holds title documents and that the case is unresolved in a Taliban court. On September 8 Taliban forces surrounded the office of the High Shia Council in Kabul’s Karte Char district.

Malaysia sets a date to return Rohingya

Malaysia will send 1,476 Myanmar nationals back on September 29, its home ministry said on August 27. It is the first stage of a repatriation Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announced in July, after Myanmar’s military government agreed to take back 5,000 Rohingya. Those going were identified by the Myanmar government in a diplomatic note, and two Myanmar naval warships and a hospital ship will carry them. Malaysia is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and grants no refugee status; it hosts more than 126,000 registered Rohingya. In July the Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organisation asked the government to stop the plan, saying returnees could be conscripted by the army that drove them out and used as human shields.

Ahmadi official shot dead in Punjab

Mirza Safdar Mahmood, 65, an official of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Mandi Bahauddin, Punjab, was shot by two unidentified men near the city’s central Eidgah at about 6:30 p.m. on September 2, as he walked home from the vehicle workshop he ran. He died at the scene, leaving a wife and two sons. The district police officer called it a targeted killing and said Mahmood had no known enemies; no arrests have been reported. Two Ahmadis were killed in the same district in June 2024, and three were injured in an attack at Rabwah in June this year. Pakistan’s constitution declares Ahmadis non-Muslims, and penal code sections 298-B and 298-C make their religious practice a criminal offense.

West Papua displacement passes 127,000

Human Rights Monitor counted 127,031 people displaced by armed conflict in West Papua as of August 31, in an update published on September 7. Indonesia’s own figures are close behind: deputy minister Mugiyanto Sipin put the number at about 122,000 in July, and the national human rights commission Komnas HAM at 124,931 in August. Security operations in the Korowai area of Yahukimo from July 22 sent roughly 600 people into the forest, about 3,000 have fled Intan Jaya since June, and 4,584 from Oksob in Pegunungan Bintang remain displaced since December 2024. Most are Indigenous Papuans living in forest shelters with little humanitarian access, food, health care, or schooling.

Four sectarian cases in one Egyptian week

The Egyptian researcher Ishak Ibrahim set out four incidents in Al-Manassa in early September. A retailer printed and sold shirts carrying Islamic State slogans, among them material endorsing the jizya levied on non-Muslims. The television presenter Dina al-Masry used derogatory language about Copts on air; the Al-Mehwar channel ended her contract and the media syndicate took up her membership. Jomana Kamal, a student at Badr University, was kept from her graduation ceremony over her clothing and her cross, and the university acted only after she filed a police report. The Coptic activist Bassem al-Ganoubi disappeared; his arrest was announced six days later, on a complaint brought by Bishop Agathon of Maghagha.