Just days after one of the worst gang massacres in Haiti’s history, gunmen attacked another town there on Thursday — but Haitians here in South Florida say they expect resistance to the assault to be more "determined" given the town's importance.
Last week, a provincial gang, known as Gran Grif, allegedly stormed the town of Pont-Sondé in Haiti's central Artibonite department, killing 115 people.
Now, according to local residents and Haitian media, a gang from the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, known as the Taliban, is assaulting the coastal town of Arcahaie — an invasion that could have even more dire consequences for the violence-ravaged and impoverished Caribbean country.
Thursday afternoon, locals said at least one person had been killed — and Haitians fear fighting between the gunmen and residents could get fiercer.
That’s because Arcahaie is a strategic transit point between Port-au-Prince — 80% of which is ruled by gangs — and the national interior north of the capital. Many speculate that control of Arcahaie, which is also where the Haitian flag was created, could help Haiti’s violent and powerful gangs expand their terrorist grip into the rest of the country.
“The regular folk I'm hearing from there today seem especially determined, because Arcahaie is the last bastion of resistance to the gang violence," said South Florida Haitian community leader Pierre Imbert, of Aventura, who is an Arcahaie native and directs development projects there.
"If they have to let go of Arcahaie, you can imagine what would happen.”
READ MORE: The death toll in a gang attack on a small Haitian town rises to 115, a local official says
That risk of even further gang control of Haiti would seem to prompt a more urgent response from the U.N.-approved and U.S.-funded multinational security support (MSS) mission in Haiti, led by Kenyan police, which arrived in the country over the summer. Its presence is believed to be a big reason the gangs are trying to expand their dominance beyond Port-au-Prince.
But, especially after last week's Pont-Sondé atrocity, which security forces still seemed either powerless or too slow to stop, “I think Haitians are losing hope because of its ineffectiveness," Imbert told WLRN.
"So far this MSS hasn't made a real difference.”
The Biden Administration last month said it wanted to see the MSS turned into a larger, more full-fledged U.N. peacekeeping force. But last week it dropped the proposal for the time being.
Imbert and other Haitians monitoring the situation from the U.S. say people in Haiti believe the Taliban, a gang based in Canaan outside of the capital, were getting help from the Port-au-Prince gang coalition known as the G-9 or Viv Ansanm (meaning Live Together in Creole).
The coalition's chief, former Haitian policeman and now top gang leader Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier, released a 5-minute video on Thursday urging Arcahaie residents to stop confronting the gang members trying to make their way into the town.
The U.N. says Haiti's gang violence has killed almost 4,000 people so far this year — and displaced more than 100,000 Haitians, including some 6,000 as a result of the Pont-Sondé massacre alone.
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