In the past few days, armed gunmen in Haiti have killed dozens of farmers in a rural fishing village north of Port-au-Prince, attacked an armored police vehicle, killing the driver and injuring two cops in the hills above the capital, and set fire to a police station in the country’s breadbasket to consolidate their hold on the Lower Artibonite region.

The escalating violence come as efforts by the United States to get a more aggressive and lethal force capable of suppressing gangs remain uncertain at the United Nations Security Council, and as Kenyan President William Ruto suggests that his police forces leading the Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti could be exiting within the next two weeks when the U.N.-authorized mandate expires on Oct. 2.

”The future is very bleak,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said this week during a panel discussion on the crisis sponsored by the Inter-American Dialogue and Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy.

Felbab-Brown said she doesn’t know if Ruto’s statements are a way to get an extension on the one-year mandate the Security Council authorized for Kenya to lead the mission in Haiti or to get more money. The East African nation has been frustrated about the poor equipment, lack of manpower and money to help dismantled Haiti’s gangs. But any premature departure of the mission before a new force arrives, she said, would be disastrous.

“It’s very easy for Kenya to wash its hands of it at this point, and there is no incentive to stay, because there is no big prize to be gained,” she told the Miami Herald. “But I think that will be an absolute disaster if that happens. Who knows when this mythical Gang Suppression Force will show up, and who will staff it?”

If Ruto pulls the mission out, she said, “then no one will stay without the Kenyans.“

Gang attacks outside capital

While one of the country’s best known gang leaders, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, has called for some of the more than 1.3 million people who have been displaced to return home to central Port-au-Prince, members of his powerful Viv Ansanm coalition and their allies have been sowing havoc outside the capital in once peaceful communities.

At around 1 a.m. Monday, armed gunmen with the Gran Grif gang stormed the rural town of Liancourt and set fire to the local police station after an hourslong firefight with police, Bertide Horace, a community activist in the area, said.

“The situation is very complicated,” she told Port-au-Prince’s Magik 9 radio station the day after the attack. “At this moment, the bandits have encircled the Lower Artibonite” region.

Gran Grif, Kokorat San Ras, Viv Ansanm and the 5-Star gangs are all currently in cities connecting the Lower Artibonite to parts of the Central Plateau, which is east of the capital and abuts the Artibonite, she said. As a result, the commune of Dessalines, named after the country’s founding father, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and the city of St. Marc, are now “sandwiched” between gang strongholds.

“The gangs are advancing, while the authorities seem to be retreating,” Horace said.

The assault on the Liancourt police station came after two other high-profile attacks. On Wednesday and Thursday, gunmen with Viv Ansanm, who have been in control of the city Cabaret since March 2024, stormed the small, neighboring fishing village of Labodrie, 20 miles north of Haiti’s capital. Despite attempts by police and a local citizen’s group to push them back, at least 40 people, including children and elderly, were killed by gang members who also set homes ablaze.

The reasons for the massacre, according to information gathered by the local National Human Rights Defense Network: the Sept. 7 killing of a local gang leader known as “Vlad” and accusations that residents of Labodrie were acting as informants for police officers in the adjacent town of Arcahaie.

Then, sometime between Saturday and Sunday, gunmen threw a Molotov cocktail into an armored vehicle in Kenscoff in the mountains above Port-au-Prince. Two policemen were injured and the driver was killed, police confirmed, after the vehicle landed in a ditch.

Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime’s office, citing the Labodrie massacre, said in a statement that the government had called an urgent meeting of the high command of the Haiti National Police in response to the attacks and ordered the deployment of specialized units to secure the area. The government said it also ordered police to increase security in Cabaret, Arcahaie and surrounding areas, and to provide assistance to victims.

The Labodrie massacre, which has been strongly condemned by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, forced the displacement of more than 2,900 people, the International Organization for Migration said.

United Nations week

Next week world leaders will meet in New York for the United Nations General Assembly with a number of possible side events on the deepening crisis in Haiti hosted by the Caribbean Community, as well as groups like Clinton Global Initiative and Chatham House.

Ahead of the gathering, Washington has been circulating another version of its resolution to create a new Gang Suppression Force among members of the Security Council. Sources say while negotiations are ongoing, discussions have been heated as China and Russia remain unengaged. Two of the council’s five permanent members, the two nations have the power to veto the resolution.

Among the questions yet to be answered is where the 5,500 personnel for the new force will come from, and who is going to pay. While countries in the region like Panama, El Salvador and Colombia have expressed an interest in fielding the new force, they also want someone else to pay for it, which Washington so far has balked at, after publicly saying it can’t continue shouldering the financial burden of Haiti’s crisis.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand also recently told the Globe and Mail that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio asked Canada to play a role in stabilizing Haiti during their one-on-one meeting in August. The country, approached by the Biden administration, turned down deploying troops.

“If we had a hard time staffing 2,500 I’m not entirely sure where they’re going to come from,” Keith Mines, who most recently served as vice president for Latin America at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said, referring to the Kenyan mission’s force numbers that were never achieved. “I don’t see anyone in the hemisphere that’s ready to step up.”

On Tuesday, Mines joined Velbab-Brown and Wolf Pamphile, the founder of Haiti Policy House, a Washington-based think tank focused on policy solutions, for the panel discussion.

Pamphile, pointing out gangs’ command of social media to push their message, said he believes that Haiti’s internal forces are sufficient to fight the gangs and blamed the problem on a lack of political will.

“Political consensus is fundamental,” Velbab-Brown said. By any measure, she said, the Kenya-led mission has “failed to improve the situation,” but without it “we would see far more intense deterioration.”

Mines did not disagree. Given gangs’ expansion beyond the capital, he warned that, “in a country like Haiti, the further things descend, the harder it’s going to be to get back.”

But if the next force is to succeed, Mines said there needs to a number of critical elements, starting with visible U.S. leadership.

“It’s always been behind the scenes. It has been kind of pushing somebody else to do it, but I think U.S. leaders, visible and clear, really need to be present,” he said. “When there’s U.S. personnel on the ground, it is kind of a game changer. I think, for the bad guys, they see the presence of Americans, and ... they feel differently, less empowered, than they do when it’s somebody else.”

Gangs need to face an existential threat, Mines said, where “you either go to jail or get killed, or you can join this program” as part of a demobilization effort.

“They could go after the bad guys all they want. If there’s no prison that can hold them, if there’s no judiciary that can at least go through a marginal process of convicting, then we have just kind of lost the threat on that,” he said.

Ruto’s dilemma

For now, Ruto has called for a seamless transition from the U.N. But with his troops in Haiti less visible and a scheduled rotation of the two first contingents yet to take place, some observers fear the Kenyans may already be ready to leave.

Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader, who has accused the international community of abandoning Haiti, has acknowledged as much. During one of his recent weekly Monday press conferences, Abinader, citing Ruto as the source, said the mission will end by the end of the year. The United States, he said, has stated it is backing a different policy and strategy to reestablish security and order in Haiti.

So far, Ruto has not confirmed if or when his troops are leaving. But privately, his officials have been expressing frustrations over the lack of uncertainty and clarity from Washington over the mission’s role in Haiti after Oct. 2.

With the gangs growing stronger and Haiti headed into another political transition, Felbab-Brown warned, the country could find itself in a terrifying situation worse than February 2024, when gangs consolidated their power and united.

“The gangs over the past year have spread into the Artibonite and into the central part of the country and the border with the Dominican Republic,” she said. “The situation is potentially dramatically worsening.”

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