BASSIN-BLEU, Haiti — Days after a criminal gang stormed this rural village in Haiti’s northwest, setting fire to the local police substation and looting homes, residents remain gripped by fear amid concerns that the violence isn’t over.

On Saturday, normally a busy day for the area’s 30,000-residents, streets remained deserted with torched vehicles, while the local market was devoid of the usual bustling traffic. Sellers, like customers, had yet to return after most residents had fled the area, crossing on foot through the mountains to neighboring Port-de-Paix, and through a swollen river to escape the gangs’ deadly wrath.

“A lot of people are scared, a lot of people left Bassin-Bleu for Port-de-Paix,” Mayor Tony Manigat told the Miami Herald. “A lot of people would like to return, but they scared because people are always saying the gunmen are not that far away, and at any moment they can seize on them here.”

Yet, even as he acknowledged the fear gripping residents, he and local government prosecutor vowed that law and order will return to the community.

“I guarantee you, security will return,” Prosecutor Jeir Pierre who came from Port-de-Paix said.

As he spoke, Pierre stood armed with a gun strapped to his chest. Down the road, a lone police vehicle stood outside the burned ruins of the police substation station while another vehicle stood watch in front of the morgue, where the charred corpse of a schoolteacher killed during the attack was being held.

Located on the border of the Artibonite and Northwest regions of Haiti, Bassin-Bleu became the latest rural community to come under gang attack Thursday when more than 50 gunmen targeted residents in broad daylight. Resident say the siege was carried out by members of the violent Kokorat San Ras gang based in the nearby locality of Ti Bwadòm in Gros-Morne in the Artibonite.

After years of expanding their control over towns in the Lower Artibonite region, the armed group has now set its sights on conquering the Northwest, where Bassin Bleu is a gateway, and the port city of Port-de-Paix is the capital.

On Sunday, videos circulated showing Kokorat San Ras gang members setting fire the night before to a rice mill in Kapenyen, which is part of L’Estère, a rice-growing area in the Lower Artibonite region. The gang members faces are never shown.

But as they announce themselves, the camera pans to lighters setting sacks of rice inside the mill on fire as unidentified voices yell, “We are burning it” and the sounds of gunshots can be heard going off. Another video also shows the gangs’ impressive artillery of automatic weapons.

The new offensives are part of a growing wave of violence on rural communities by criminal gangs that have been gaining strength — and territory outside of gang-controlled Port-au-Prince. The escalating violence comes as efforts by the United States to get a more aggressive and lethal “Gang Suppression Force” capable of dismantling Haiti’s armed groups remain uncertain at the United Nations Security Council.

As Kenyan President William Ruto suggests, his police forces leading the Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti could be exiting within the next two weeks when their U.N.-authorized mandate expires on Oct. 2.

In a statement deploring the incident, the Catholic Bishop for the Northwest Diocese, Monsignor Charles Peters Barthelus, said the gunmen “entered without encountering any resistance from the police.”

In addition to the hospital and police station in Bassin-Bleu, the gunmen stormed the hospital, looted a credit union, kidnapped residents and sowed choas in the town, he said.

“After Port-au-Prince, the Artibonite, Central Plateau, now it is Bassen Ble,” the statement said, using the Haitian Creole spelling for town. “Let’s stop believing in fine words. Now, we need real action and results.”

During a visit to Bassin-Bleu on Saturday, a Herald freelancer found a community still very much on edge, even as the local authorities insisted it had not fallen to gangs, and they were back in control. But as rumors swirled that the gang was on its way to launch another assault, merchants in the market could be seen hurriedly packing their goods.

Both Pierre and Manigat said they will not be dissuaded by the latest turn of events. Efforts were already underway, they said, to rebuild what the gang, an ally of powerful Viv Ansanm alliance in Port-au-Prince, had destroyed, including seeking donations of paint and construction materials for the police station and town hall.

“We just can’t leave it like that,” Manigat said about the burned town hall. “It’s an institution and deserves for all of us to come together.” He appealed for displaced residents to return.

“We are present,” Pierre added, noting that police officers were also present in the town. “Life must return.”

“Bassin-Bleu,” he insisted, “did not fall to the gangs. It was an attack they carried out, and the people should return.”

Police in both the Artibonite and Northwest regions, he said, need to coordinate their efforts to get rid of the armed groups, which have had residents of the region paralyzed by fear of invasion for years. While police in the Northwest cannot take it upon themselves to go after the armed group, Pierre said they are “willing to go fight against them.”

“If the Artibonite decides to eradicate the gangs, and they ask us in then northwest to give a hand ... I guarantee you after sometime, the gang will disappear,” he said. “We are clear about this, once the police in the Artibonite, Gonaives wants to attack and they invite us, we will join the fight.”

Because Kokorat San Ras is based in the Artibonite, Pierre said the police in the region “need to take all the necessary measures, dispositions” including asking their colleagues in the Northwest “for backup to eradicate and attack these gangs because they cannot be allowed to remain.”

In a statement following an attack days earlier where gunmen massacred at least 40 people in the rural fishing village of Labordrie, just north of the capital, Amnesty International called on Haitian authorities to take action to protect the population. The attack was carried out by members of Viv Ansanm, the powerful gang coalition that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the Trump administration.

The rights organization also called for the international community, which is meeting this week during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, to increase support to Haiti as the violence drives displacement, hunger and deaths. On Sunday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in New York, where the two discussed developments in Haiti among other global challenges.

“Amnesty International reiterates the call to members of the U.N. Security Council to act urgently in the face of the crisis in Haiti by implementing measures that guarantee the enjoyment of human rights and the humanitarian needs of Haitians,” the group said.

The attacks on vulnerable communities highlight not only the weakness of the Haitian state in protecting its citizens but the ineffective response to such crises, which “only perpetuates the cycle of impunity and exposes more communities” to the same fate, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for Campaigns in the Americas, César Marín, said.

“The international community and national authorities cannot remain indifferent while the country’s people continue to be victims of atrocity crimes,” Marín said. “The Haitian population has the right to live in dignity and safety, without the constant fear of armed gang attacks.”

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(Corneille is a special correspondent.)

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