A mass attack in central Haiti on Thursday left at least 70 people dead, including 10 women and three young children, and sent hundreds fleeing for their lives, according to the United Nations human rights office.
The attack is part of a growing wave of violence in the country’s rural areas and poses a new challenge for international security forces, which have been deployed to Haiti since June and whose primary mission is to quell gang violence.
The attack occurred around 3 a.m. in Pont Sonde, about 90 miles north of the capital Port-au-Prince. The town is located in Artibonite province, an important agricultural region where gang violence is on the rise, according to the Ministry of Health.
The UN human rights office said the attack was carried out by the Gran Griff gang, whose members used automatic weapons to shoot at residents. At least 16 people were seriously injured, including two gang members who were wounded in a shootout with Haitian police.
Gang members reportedly set fire to at least 45 homes and 34 vehicles, forcing many residents to flee, the United Nations statement said, calling for increased international security assistance to Haiti.
Gangs are mainly concentrated in Port-au-Prince, but violence is also on the rise in the Artibonite region.
At least 50 more people were injured, according to Haiti’s Ministry of Health.
“This attack comes at a time of increasing violence in the region, further exacerbating an already extremely volatile security situation,” the Health Ministry said in a statement. “This violence has disrupted the daily lives of the population and limited access to basic services, especially health care. The persistent security situation also prevents humanitarian intervention in certain areas, and the situation is becoming increasingly It has become a crisis.”
The ministry is trying to respond by air using United Nations resources, but “access to the affected areas is nearly impossible, severely limiting our ability to intervene directly,” it said.
A spokesperson for the Haitian National Police did not respond to a request for comment.
It said a multinational security assistance mission of 410 personnel, which arrived in late June from Kenya, Jamaica and Belize, would also respond. This mission is based in Port-au-Prince and does not exist in the rural Artibonite region.
International forces and the Haitian National Police sent officers “by land and air” to “calm the area and bring sanity,” said International Forces spokesman Jacques Ombaka.
Haiti has been experiencing extreme violence for more than three years since the assassination of President Jouvenel Moïse.
Gang killings and kidnappings spiked earlier this year as rival armed groups coordinated attacks on police stations, prisons and hospitals. They succeeded in forcing the Prime Minister, who left the country and was unable to return home, to resign after the airport was closed for two months due to gang violence.
Although some parts of Port-au-Prince are returning to normalcy, more than 700,000 people who fled their homes after gang attacks on the area remain unable to return. More than 100,000 people are living in squalid camps, while others have been dispersed to the homes of friends and family across the country.
The Artibonite District is known as the home of the Gran Griff Gang. Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the party’s leader, Lacson Eran, as well as local politicians who were instrumental in his rise.
If a person is sanctioned by the Treasury Department for involvement in gangs, human rights abuses, or widespread corruption, U.S. banks are prohibited from doing business with that person and they are barred from traveling to the United States.
In August, even the country’s former president, Michel Martelly, was sanctioned for his alleged involvement in drug trafficking and gang “sponsorship.”
The Ministry of Finance said in a statement that Mr. Eran was responsible for grave human rights violations, including looting, destruction, extortion, hijacking, theft of crops and livestock, as well as kidnapping, murder, beatings and rape of women and children. said.
“The situation is particularly dire for his children, who are victims of forced removal and sexual violence,” the statement said.
Artibonite is a rice-growing region in central Haiti, located between the capital and the main city of Cap-Haitien in the north. The country’s main roads run through it, and it is a source of income for gangs who set up kidnapping ambushes on the roads and abduct people en masse from buses. Artibonite gangs are also increasingly encroaching on farmland there.
More than 20 criminal organizations operate in the region, according to a report by the Global Initiative, a Geneva-based organized crime investigation agency. From January 2022 to October 2023, more than 1,690 people were killed, injured, or kidnapped in Artibonite. At one time, the region accounted for more than a quarter of Haiti’s victims of violence, the report said.
David C. Adams contributed reporting.
