They were the self-styled political “commandos” with aspirations of bringing down the authoritarian government of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. Now, the opposition says, hundreds of its activists and electoral witnesses are fleeing the country amid the fallout from last month’s contested presidential election.

“I left my mom, she’s 84… my husband did the same. My mom told me: ‘Be strong my love, everything will be alright; joy will come back to Venezuela, I’ll be here waiting for you. If I’m not here anymore by the time you come, I’ll know at least you are a free person,’” said one woman, who fled the country with her husband and son.

Her transgression in Venezuela? Helping to gather over 1,200 “actas” – the printed voting machine receipts that have become critical to the opposition’s case that the election was stolen by Maduro – the strongman leader who has ruled the country with an iron fist since the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013.

Save had been helping to oversee thousands of campaign teams called “comanditos” (“little commandos”) to galvanize voters opposed to the continued rule of Maduro. The groups were also organized to collect the actas printed out in each electoral center, in an effort to ensure a transparent election and to allow the opposition to count the votes independently from electoral authorities.

Ahead of the vote, government forces would park in front of her home as an intimidation tactic, Save said. “They would pull up on the other side of the street, a truck from the (intelligence service) SEBIN, or the special forces, with the windows down and the officers wearing balaclavas or skull masks to scare my family.”

Later, after the ballots were cast and Maduro declared victory – a claim that quickly aroused suspicions in the opposition and abroad – she and thousands of other Venezuelans took to the streets. Venezuelan security forces have since detained at least 2,000 opposition sympathizers, government numbers show, with the homes of activists in some neighborhoods of Caracas marked with black Xs. At least 24 civilians and one soldier have been killed in political violence.

Maduro himself ordered the opening of two new jails to accommodate the arrested and dubbed the police campaign to hunt down and detain as many protesters as possible “Operation Knock-Knock,” mimicking the sound of special forces knocking on the doors of opposition activists in the middle of the night to arrest them.

Save was targeted personally as the crackdown widened.

“[Trujillo’s] Governor Gerardo Marquez published a sign with my face stating that I was wanted for terrorism,” she recalled. Save denies that she was involved in terrorism or that she ever called for violence.

“I really felt they would get to me, sooner or later,” Save said.

Poking a hole in the official narrative

According to Venezuela’s electoral council, which is controlled by government sympathizers, Maduro won his reelection bid with just over 50% of the vote.

But the country’s opposition coalition, as well as electoral observers from the United Nations and the Carter Center have questioned the council’s numbers. The US, the EU and various other countries and multilateral institutions have also urged Venezuela to release granular data showing the results by polling station.

Yet, the price for disputing the government’s account of the election is high. While the publication of election tallies is admitted by Venezuelan law, the Venezuelan government has accused the opposition of releasing false “actas,” without presenting any proof. Last week, Attorney General Tarek William Saab summoned Gonzalez Urrutia for interrogation accusing him of “usurping” the Electoral Council’s functions.

Volunteers and electoral witnesses who collected the voting machine tallies have been particularly targeted by the government repression, activists say.

“Everyone who was involved in our effort is in hiding, either here or abroad,” said another opposition source involved in collecting the tallies. “The acta became like kryptonite because it proves the government is lying,” the source said.

Opposition presidential candidate Gonzalez Urrutia and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado are also in hiding. Maduro has publicly threatened them with detention.

A new life abroad

More than seven million Venezuelans have left their country since Maduro came to power in 2013, according to the United Nations. Experts fear hundreds of thousands more could follow them in the upcoming months.

The critical moment for Save took place on Friday August 2, five days after the election, she says. Moving every day for fear of arrest, she was driving in a rural area when her car broke down. Shortly after, a police patrol showed up on a motorcycle.

Several days later, she left the country in disguise.

Save is thinking of trying to make her way to the United States, where a growing number of exiled opposition politicians currently reside. But that her real hope is to return to Trujillo, where she believes that most people stand with her – even the soldiers tasked with enforcing Maduro’s rule.

“The government never imagined we could organize all our people for this. They ordered the military not to allow our witnesses to take the actas, but if we got 92% of them it means those orders were not obeyed,” she said. “The people are with us.”

Hundreds of Kenyan police officers leading an international policing force in Haiti have not received their full pay for two months, the latest complication in what has been a rocky start to the security mission in the gang-plagued Caribbean nation.

The first Kenyan officers deployed to Haiti arrived in June, the vanguard of a multinational security support mission (MSS) that is being funded largely by the United States. There are now around 400 Kenyan police in the country, many from specialized units.

In an August 25 statement acknowledging delays to payments, the MSS announced that officers could expect the missing funds to hit their bank accounts this week.

“Therefore, there is nothing to worry about (regarding) welfare issues of the MSS officers, since mainstream processes have been finalized,” the MSS added.

In a “progress report” released Monday, Kenya’s National Police Service (NPS) said that the officers were continuing “to draw their NPS salaries” while waiting for the supplemental pay for their MSS duties.

Kenyan officers had expected to be paid a significant supplement for their Haiti deployment – a grueling assignment more typical of a military than of a police force. Officers are not allowed to leave their base in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince during non-working hours.

The MSS force is expected to ultimately grow to 2,500, with more troops expected from Jamaica, Benin, Chad, the Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados and Belize. The force is hoped to bolster the Haitian National Police’s battles against an alliance of gangs that controls an estimated 85% of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.

The MSS is financed through a UN-managed trust fund, to which the US, Canada, France and Spain have contributed millions of dollars. The United States has committed at least $380 million overall in support of the mission, largely in the form of equipment and materiel.

At least 30 people have been killed following the collapse of a dam in Sudan’s northwest Red Sea State, according to the United Nations’s emergency relief agency. Hundreds more are believed missing, Reuters reported.

Flash flooding decimated 20 villages and damaged a further 50 after the Arba’at Dam collapsed Sunday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said. It estimated 50,000 people had been “severely affected” by the disaster.

In the villages of Khor-Baraka and Tukar, residents were reportedly forced to flee for safety, OCHA also said, citing local officials. It added that the final death toll could rise significantly.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) footage of the aftermath shows industrial trucks buried in mud and debris, some laden with crates and personal belongings. Other vehicles are almost unrecognizable on the silty riverbank.

One resident who lived near the dam, Moussa Mohamad Moussa, described in another video from AFP how “the dam broke and… the water swept away around 40 people.”

“In the area where I’m from, the Tabub area… they told me that all the houses and everything was swept away,” he said.

Another resident, Ali Issa, was pictured saying he had helped to rescue families, elderly people, and children who were trapped in their cars when the floodwaters rose. “We came to the area to check out the situation but we couldn’t reach the Arba’at Dam because there was so much water,” he said.

Initial reports indicated torrential rains had caused the dam to breach, OCHA said, adding this had resulted in the reservoir behind it “being fully drained.”

The dam facility supplies fresh water to Port Sudan, the country’s fifth largest city, which is about 38 kilometers (23 miles) to the southeast.

OCHA said the damage was expected to worsen the humanitarian situation in Red Sea State. In recent months, aid agencies have warned Sudan is on the brink of collapse and starvation following more than a year of civil war.

Sudan’s Federal Minister of Health, Dr. Haitham Muhammad Ibrahim, promised emergency humanitarian assistance including the provision of basic medicines and medical personnel during a visit to the region Sunday, according to a statement by his office. He also committed to provide resources to support evacuation efforts.

On Monday, Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) chief and head of the Sudanese Transitional Sovereignty Council Abdel Fattah al-Burhan visited Tokhar, an area devastated by the weekend’s storms but unaffected by the dam collapse, according to a statement from the council. Footage posted to X by the council shows Al-Burhan speaking with residents of the town, roughly 170km south of Arba’at.

The region surrounding the Arba’at Dam has been wracked with humanitarian challenges. The region hosts nearly 240,000 displaced people, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.

OCHA said it is liaising with partners, including United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund and WASH Cluster and local officials to reach communities affected by the collapse.

Japan says a Chinese military intelligence-gathering aircraft entered its territorial airspace off remote islands in the East China Sea on Monday, the first time Tokyo has accused the People’s Liberation Army Air Force of an airspace violation and a new irritant in frosty relations between China and Japan.

A map released by the Japanese Defense Ministry showed the Chinese aircraft, a Y-9 reconnaissance plane, flying in a rectangular circuit pattern off the eastern side of the Danjo Islands when it briefly headed west and crossed into the islands’ territorial airspace – which extends 12 nautical miles from the coast of the islands – for about two minutes.

The Japanese Defense Ministry said it scrambled Air Self-Defense Force fighter jets to respond to the alleged intrusion, but no confrontation with the Chinese plane was reported.

Japan’s Foreign Ministry said it summoned Shi Yong, charge d’affairs of the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo, “to protest extremely severely and strongly request the prevention of a recurrence.”

The Japanese military frequently scrambles fighter jets to confront Chinese military planes that approach but have not previously entered its territory, doing so 479 times – more than once a day – in the past fiscal year that ended in April, according to the Defense Ministry.

But the alleged incursion into sovereign airspace brings that tension to a higher level.

“In recent years, China’s military activities in the vicinity of our country have tended to expand and become more and more active,” Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said at a press conference Tuesday.

“The invasion of our country’s airspace by Chinese military aircraft is not only a serious violation of our country’s sovereignty, but also a threat to our safety, and is completely unacceptable,” Hayashi said.

The uninhabited Danjo Islands, a Japanese national monument and wildlife protection area, are in the East China Sea about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the southwest of Nagasaki on the southern Japanese main island of Kyushu.

While this was the first reported incidence of a Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force aircraft violating Japanese airspace, there have been two similar incidents in the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands, which China calls the Diaoyus and claims as its sovereign territory, in the East China Sea.

In 2012, a Chinese maritime surveillance plane entered airspace around the Senkakus and in 2017 a drone launched from a China Coast Guard vessel did the same, according to the Japanese government.

But this week’s incident is the first time such an incursion has been attributed to a military plane.

The uninhabited Senkaku chain has been a sore spot in Japan-China relations for years.

Claims over the rocky islands, 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo but only about 205 miles (330 kilometers) from China’s east coast, date back centuries, and neither Japan nor China is likely to back down over territory considered a national birthright in both capitals.

Tensions heated up in 2012, after Tokyo bought some of the islands from a private Japanese owner, which Beijing took as a direct challenge to its sovereignty claims.

It has frequently dispatched China Coast Guard and other government vessels to the waters around the islands to assert those claims, including keeping a Chinese presence near the islands for a record 158 straight days earlier this year, according to the Japanese government.

Any Japanese-Chinese incident in the Senkakus raises the risk of a wider conflict, analysts note, due to Japan’s mutual defense treaty with the United States.

Washington has made clear on numerous occasions that it considers the Senkakus to be covered by the pact.