Around a quarter of registered voters took part in Saturday’s presidential election (WaPo), the national election commission estimated, roughly half as many as in the last presidential vote in 2014. The turnout could be the country’s lowest since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

The Taliban threatened widespread violence to disrupt the election. At least twenty police officers and nine civilians were killed in attacks that targeted voting centers (TOLO), according to officials. Still, election chief Hawa Alam Nuristani called it (NYT) “a better election” compared to others. A new biometric voter identification system will be used to tally ballots in the coming weeks, with preliminary results due in mid-October.

Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong protested for the seventeenth consecutive weekend, just ahead of China marking the seventieth anniversary (SCMP) of the founding of the People’s Republic. Some protesters threw gasoline bombs and lit fires, while police used tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets on crowds. 

Ahead of the anniversary, CFR’s Jerome A. Cohen looks at China’s painful human rights story.

Indonesia: More than thirty people died and 150 others were injured in a 6.5-magnitude earthquake (Reuters) that hit the eastern province of Maluku, according to officials.

Opposition politician Maulana Muhammad Hanif and at least two other people were killed in a bomb blast (RFE/RL) in the country’s southwest. Hanif, the leader of a right-wing religious party, had been planning an anti-government march for next month.

Houthi rebels in Yemen released a video claiming their forces killed or wounded five hundred Saudi and Yemeni forces (CNN) in an August attack that crossed into Saudi Arabia’s southern Najran region. Saudi officials have not yet responded to the claim.

CFR’s Global Conflict Tracker looks at the most recent developments in Yemen’s war.

Egypt: Prominent activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was arrested (AP) in a security crackdown on anti-government protests in recent weeks. Abdel Fattah was on probation after serving a five-year prison sentence for protesting military trials for civilians.

The government begins a weeklong national dialogue (VOA) in the capital of Yaounde today to discuss ending the separatist crisis in the country’s western regions. Some separatist leaders said they will not participate in peace talks unless they are held outside Cameroon with a foreign mediator. 

Somalia: The militant group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for suicide car bombings on Monday, two on a U.S. military base (AP) in southern Somalia and another that targeted Italian peacekeepers in Mogadishu. Civilians were reportedly injured in the Mogadishu attack.

Preliminary tallies showed former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party won 37 percent (BBC) of the vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections. The far-right Freedom Party, at the center of a political scandal in May, took 16 percent, a 10 percent drop (DW) since the last elections. 

Russia: At least twenty thousand people protested in Moscow (Moscow Times) to call for the release of activists detained in recent pro-democracy demonstrations, according to police.

In Foreign Affairs, Susan B. Glasser discusses how the West has underestimated Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Around two hundred people, many of them from the Chiquitano indigenous group, are marching more than three hundred miles across Bolivia to call for President Evo Morales to declare wildfires (Reuters) in the country a national disaster. 

Mexico: The UN refugee chief, on a visit to the country’s south, called for more support for Mexico’s asylum agency (Reuters), which is slated in 2019 to receive its lowest level of federal funding in seven years.

Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley will be sworn in today (Defense One) as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley served tours (NYT) in Iraq and Afghanistan and was a force behind the Army Futures Command, an initiative to modernize the service branch.