A woman and child try to navigate a demonstration against self-degenerate violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti March 29, 2022. ODELYN JOSEPH / AP
At least eighteen civilians have been killed in recent days in Port-au-Prince, where two gangs are fighting for control of popular neighborhoods north of the capital, the Protection of Haitian Civilians said on Wednesday, April 27, according to a preliminary report.
Among those civilians “killed between April 24 and 26” were “a family of eight” and “three young women and three children,” according to a report prepared by the public body and sent to the Agence France was sent. AFP).
“Several hundred people” left this area of clashes, including fifty who, according to the document, took refuge in a public square “a few hundred meters from the front line.” Sleeping in makeshift shelters, they are exposed to “considerable safety and protection risks, especially the risk of gender-based violence for women, girls and children,” warns the civil defense.
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Increased gear grip
“The gunmen of the 400 Mawozo gang set my house on fire” and “killed several of my neighbors before also burning down their houses,” Lucien, a resident of the area, told AFP. “They rape women and girls if they manage to enter a house,” added the man, who declined to give his full name for fear of reprisals. This powerful and feared group of 400 Mawozo abducted a group of seventeen people, made up of North American missionaries and their relatives, including five children, in the fall of 2021.
The gangs, long confined to the very deprived areas of Port-au-Prince’s seafront, have greatly expanded their influence in the city and across the country since autumn 2020, multiplying killings and vicious kidnappings. The Haitian authorities have yet to comment on the violence crippling all activity in northern Port-au-Prince, and national police spokesman Gary Desrosiers was unable to comment to the press Wednesday afternoon.
The area where this violence is taking place is of high strategic importance as it is the only road link to the northern half of the country and between the Haitian capital and the Dominican Republic. Since June 2021, authorities have lost control of the only access road linking Port-au-Prince to the south because two kilometers of the national road are completely controlled by armed gangs from the Martissant slums. In this poor neighborhood, the grip of gangs forced Médecins Sans Frontières to close the hospital it had run for 15 years.
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