By day, the stressed-out Haitian police officer patrols the streets of his beleaguered city with an Israeli assault rifle to do his bit to resist the onslaught of the gangs. By night, the 28-year-old returns home to his increasingly empty neighbourhood wondering what calamity may unfold as he rests.
“Yesterday afternoon … there was panic, heavy gunfire ... It was tense … there was continuous gunfire throughout the day,” the officer said this week as the battle for control of Port-au-Prince raged on.
“I wondered if by the time I woke up the next morning, I would still recognise the city,” added the officer, a member of a specialised rapid-response unit tasked with thwarting the advance of the gangs. “I fear we’ll wake up to the announcement that Port-au-Prince has fallen.”
The officer, who asked not to be named, is not alone in his trepidation.
The year-old criminal insurrection in Haiti’s capital has plumbed new depths in recent days, fuelling speculation that the entire city – the third-largest in the Caribbean – may be on the verge of falling into the hands of a coalition of heavily armed gangs called Viv Ansanm (Live Together).
Frantz Duval, the head of Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, warned in a despondent editorial that the fall of Haiti’s capital could be imminent. “Like Phnom Penh overrun by the Khmer Rouge, Saigon swallowed by north Vietnamese troops, Tripoli after Muammar Gaddafi’s fall, Sana’a seized by the Houthis, or Kabul taken by the Taliban – Port-au-Prince has been hanging by a thread for long enough that one must now fear the rumours and cries of anguish are not mere echoes, but the sound of its final collapse,” he wrote.
Duval said that since the criminal uprising began in February 2024 “the situation has spiralled completely out of control”. Just over a year later, Port-au-Prince is on the brink, with at least 60,000 people fleeing their homes over the past month to escape the fighting, according to UN estimates. More than a million have been displaced since the mutiny was launched.
“In recent hours, countless ministries, public services and families have fled areas that were once considered safe,” Duval reported, as gang combatants continued to advance, burning buildings and threatening to completely commandeer Haiti’s capital.
“The gangs’ assaults, punctuated by bursts of automatic gunfire … leave flight as the only option,” Duval wrote. Yet for most Haitians, escape is now impossible, he added: “Every exit from the capital is under the control of armed groups.”
“Fear is written all over people’s faces,” said Rosy Auguste Ducéna, a human-rights activist who works with the victims of gang violence and has spent recent days watching displaced people stream past her group’s offices carrying suitcases and bags. “It feels like the population is suffering while the authorities stand by and do nothing.”
The disintegration of Port-au-Prince has been a torturous and gradual process, rooted in centuries of colonial exploitation, foreign meddling, brutal dictatorship, political corruption and dysfunction, and a series of devastating natural disasters such as the 2010 earthquake.
Now, some fear the security situation could be close to completely unraveling, with a succession of once-safe areas such as Solino and Nazon falling under the control of gangs, aid workers from the medical group Médecins Sans Frontières coming under fire, and the headquarters of Haiti’s oldest radio station being torched.
Earlier this month, the city’s mayor, Youri Chevry, admitted that his government only controlled about 30% of the city, with several key areas “in a state of war”.
On Wednesday, thousands of protesters took to the streets to denounce the violence – and the government’s failure to contain it. “We are ready to die to defend our neighborhoods, our families, and our homes. We are ready to take responsibility. If we must die, we will die standing, without surrendering,” one protester told Le Nouvelliste, as armed self-defense groups erected roadblocks to defend communities yet to be conquered by the gangs.
William O’Neill, a UN human-rights expert who visited Port-au-Prince earlier this month, saw no exaggeration in comparisons with Saigon or Kabul: “The sense of fear is palpable. The sense [that] the city is on the edge of totally falling into the hands of the gangs is really strong.”
“This is really dramatic. I can’t overstate it. It’s incredibly urgent and frightening,” warned O’Neill, who said the wealthy hilltop districts around Pétionville were now “pretty much the last safe areas in the capital”. “But [for] how long? That’s the question,” he added.
Things were supposed to have turned out differently.
When a transitional government was set up last April, after the prime minister, Ariel Henry, was ousted by the criminal rebellion, its members voiced optimism that the situation could be reversed. “Today is an important day in the life of our dear republic. This day in effect opens a view to a solution,” declared Henry’s temporary replacement, Michel Patrick Boisvert.
Three months later, the first members of a planned 2,500-strong, UN-backed security force were deployed, with its commanders also insisting peace could be restored.
But so far only about 1,000 members of that Kenya-led operation have reached Haiti. Experts say they are woefully ill-equipped for their fight against Haiti’s powerful, politically linked gangs, as is the country’s embattled national police force.
Last week, a 26-year-old Kenyan police constable, Samuel Tompoi, was buried in Kenya after being shot dead while patrolling – the first member of the mission to die in the line of duty. He left a 23-year-old wife and two children.
“They’re outnumbered and outgunned … They need helicopters to move around easily and safely … they need night-vision goggles, body armour, you name it – and they need more people,” O’Neill said, also calling for an arms embargo to stop guns being smuggled to Haiti from the US.
In their desperation, Haitian police have started employing dramatic tactics similar to those used on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Recent weeks have seen reports of a series of suicide drone attacks, targeting gang bosses who live deep in Port-au-Prince’s maze-like shantytowns, surrounded by barricades and guards. “With kamikaze drones we can reach places police officers can’t go,” the police officer explained.
Françoise Ponticq, a French dentist who works in a clinic near the partly deserted Champ de Mars plaza, heard “loud blasts” last week as those drones were detonated, although precisely where she could not say.
Of one thing Ponticq was sure: Port-au-Prince had reached a perilous crossroads. “It’s either the gangs take us, or we take them,” she said. “It’s a coin toss, in my opinion.”
