Massacre highlights Haiti’s deepening security crisis

They arrived in silence, under cover of darkness, heavily armed as they surrounded the town and moved through Kenscoff’s rugged terrain and towering forests in the mountains above the Haitian capital.

Numbering around 150, the gunmen swept through several locations as they made their way toward the center of the town, opening fire on resident who tried to flee. At least 13 people were shot and killed as the gunmen ran through downtown, according to an account by the United Nations human rights office.

As more than 50 others sought refuge in L’Arche de la Nouvelle Alliance, a Protestant church that had been sheltering people already displaced by the violence, the gunmen pursued them. When they arrive, they forced residents from the church and executed 22 of them in its courtyard. A dozen others were killed behind the sanctuary.

The attackers didn’t just stop there. Before withdrawing from downtown, an area encompassing City Hall and a Haiti National Police substation, they abducted at least 52 people, including a mother and her five children, as well as another mother and her infant.

Children and elderly who could not run were killed inside their homes. Others were burned alive after gunmen set at least a dozen houses on fire, witnesses told the National Human Rights Defense Network. The attackers also shot horses and other livestock inside the rural enclave.

“The massacre is deeply shocking, but it is not an isolated tragedy,” Carlos Ruiz Massieu, special representative of the Secretary-General for Haiti and head of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti, told the Security Council on Friday.

The Kenscoff assault is the latest in a series of attacks affecting the administrative district over the past 20 months, he said. But the horrifying attack “demonstrates the continued capacity and determination of gangs to terrorize the population, expand their influence beyond the capital and pose a direct challenge to state authority and the rule of law.”

The Kenscoff rampage has also revealed the impact of the illicit arms flows, weak security and urgent humanitarian gaps for survivors and displaced families in Haiti, Ruiz Massieu, calling for the unconditional release of prisoners.

“Expressions of concern are important and reflect our solidarity with the Haitian people, but they must be accompanied by sustained action,” he said.

“Haiti urgently needs existing commitments to translate into concrete results,” he added, echoing the message from others calling for a ramp up in the deployment of the 5,500-member U.N.-authorized Gang Suppression Force.

Friday’s Security Council briefing on the escalating violence was convened at the request of Panama, Colombia and the United States. Speaking on behalf of the U.S., Jennifer Locetta, the alternative representative for special political affairs, acknowledged that the Kenscoff attack followed months of deadly violence, and “is another reminder of the dire state of Haiti’s security crisis.

“For months, terrorist gangs have murdered civilians, terrorized communities, burned homes, and destroyed families,” she said. “Now, they’re finally saying the quiet part out loud. By their own public statements, gang coalitions seek to prevent Haitian voters from exercising their rights to elect their representative government in a future election.”

Hours earlier, the Department of Homeland Security posted a video showing Haitians in chains boarding a U.S. deportation flight to Haiti. The 57 U.S. deportees, which included children born in the U.S., are among nearly 200,000 people forcibly returned in the first eight months of this year from the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas and the U.S., among others.

“Families are still searching for missing relatives, while communities face widespread trauma, displacement and uncertainty about the fate of their loved ones,” said Indrika Ratwatte, acting secretary general for humanitarian affairs.

Marta Hurtado, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the assault “is a stark reminder of the persistent brutality of gang violence that is inflicted on local and displaced populations in Haiti.”

Based on information gathered so far, she said, the U.N. has verified at least 47 people were killed in the rampage — including three boys and two girls — and 22 others who were wounded.

On Friday, Hurtado provided new details on how the attack unfolded, amid questions about the capabilities, preparedness and intelligence-gathering of security forces in Haiti. They were among the concerns raised by members of the U.N. Security Council, which called for speeding up the deployment of the international gang-fighting force and stronger efforts against the gangs on the part of the Haitian government.

“The crisis in Haiti has dragged on for many years, and the international community, including the U.N., has long provided security and humanitarian support. Yet Haiti has still been unable to escape the misfortune of turmoil,” Sun Lei, deputy permanent representative of China, said. “The Haitian people should not become victims of the country’s prolonged governance failures and dysfunction. The Haitian authorities must earnestly assume the primary responsibility for governance.”

Efforts to stop bloodshed

The U.N. account on the Kenscoff massacre, published ahead of the Security Council meeting, was broadly consistent with findings by rights defense network, which interviewed several witnessed who described efforts to stop the bloodshed and identified the dead.

Among them was a security guard inside the house of Dr. Jean William “Bill” Pape, whose house was targeted, and a security guard who worked for Kenscoff City Hall. The human-rights organization said the dozens of abducted residents were being held by several gang leaders in at least two different locations.

In a video widely shared on social media on Monday, a voice threatened to execute the captives if security operations against them continued. Some of the hostages are being held as bargaining chips and human shields, according to human rights advocates.

“I have eight of my family members in their hands,” Jean, 29, a member of a local self-defense brigade, told the Miami Herald as he joined others in taking arms, hoping to stop the carnage.

Police officers joined Jean and other members of the local citizens’ brigade to fight back, but they were unable to stop the bloodshed.

“After several hours of fighting, reinforcements finally reached downtown Kenscoff,” the rights network said. “Several armored vehicles entered the town and participated in operations to push back the attackers.”

Questions about the massacre have gone largely unanswered. At a Haitian national police press conference on Thursday, frustrated journalists pressed officials about the response to the attack and conflicting accounts of the death toll.

Garry Desrosiers, a spokesman for the Haiti National Police, declined on Thursday to provide a figure for the dead, saying the police doesn’t want to get into a “numbers war.”

Still, the uncertainty of the toll has only added to broader concerns about Haitian authorities’ ability to protect Kenscoff, a strategically important mountain district that once had seven gang-fighting teams backed by seven armored vehicles.

That deployment had been sharply reduced before the latest assault.

After a meeting with the Haitian prime minister on Monday, the U.N.-authorized Gang Suppression Force, which remains in the initial phase of its deployment, agreed to deploy personnel to downtown Port-au-Prince in order to free up more Haitian police officers to pursue gangs in Kenscoff.

Target of repeated attacks

Members of the powerful Viv Ansanm gang coalition first attacked the Kenscoff district in January 2025, and the area has since endured repeated assaults, including one last month that left as many as 105 dead, according to its mayor.

A week before the latest attack, two people were repeatedly kidnapped not far from where gangs had burned an armored Haiti National Police vehicle.

Despite the repeated attacks and kidnappings, warnings about the area’s vulnerability have gone largely addressed, said Pierre Esperance, the executive director of the human rights network. He has also raised questions about police staffing in the rural district and the relocation of an armored vehicle that had been assigned to the police substation.

For residents, the assault was an experience in pure terror — and a warning of what could come next for other areas of Haiti as gang leaders threaten to carry out similar attacks elsewhere, including in Léogâne, south of the capital, and Croix-des-Bouquets to the east.

“The guys came in silence to attack the commune,” said Jean, who asked that his full name not be used for safety reasons. “They occupied all of these corners, they burned houses, they killed people.”

When the attack began, he was standing guard, Jean said. He nearly became a casualty, he said, as he ran to take up his position in the fighting.

“We were a lot,” he said of the self-defense brigade and police officers who exchanged gunfire for hours with the attackers.

“Even though you’re fighting back, you’re stressed,” he said. “When you look at the amount of people these guys killed, it makes me feel bad.”

Before being forced to take up arms to defend Kenscoff, Jean said, he was a farmer and a motor-taxi driver. “I didn’t know anything about guns, I was someone who used to be afraid of them.”

That changed on Jan. 27, 2025, during the gangs’ first major assault when attackers burned his mother alive inside the family home.

“They burned my mother, they burned my motorcycle, they burned my home,” he said. “They didn’t leave me anything.”

Newly displaced, he lived for a while at City Hall. Still homeless, he eventually joined others from the area to defend Kenscoff. Now the violence has consumed his family again.

In addition to the relatives being held captive, his girlfriend is living on the streets. “I don’t have any place to put her,” he said.

Jean, who has children ages 3 and 11, said he has registered with several U.N. humanitarian agencies, including the World Food Program and the International Organization for Migration. Yet his situation has not improved, he said, not in terms of security or housing or other humanitarian assistance.

“I am tired of talking to people who say they are going to do something for us, and nothing happens,” he said.

Need for enhanced protection

For U.N. officials the attack underscores the immediate vulnerability of communities like Kenscoff and the larger challenges facing Haiti as gangs continue to tighten their grip and expand.

“The mass killing in Kenscoff underscores the urgent need for national authorities to enhance the protection of the population, particularly communities living in areas affected by gang violence,” Hurtado said.

She also highlighted the continued trafficking of weapons into Haiti despite a U.N. arms embargo on Haiti in place since 2022.

“Illicit flows of firearms and ammunition into Haiti continue to bolster and empower armed gangs,” she said, noting that on the day after the massacre, the 400 Mawozo gang, which operates east of Port-au-Prince, displayed on social media “what seemed to be a new shipment of weapons arriving from abroad, despite the United Nations arms embargo.”

The Kenscoff massacre, Hurtado and other U.N. officials note, comes amid a broader surge in violence that led to the deaths of at least 1,408 people in gang-related violence between April and June.

In the same period, 656 others were wounded, and 326 people were the victims of sexual violence, according to the U.N.

Haiti’s security forces on high alert

Haiti’s representative to the U.N., Pierre Ericq Pierre, said the government “condemns in the strongest possible terms these acts of extreme barbarism,” and added they constitute “a new demonstration of the capacity for violence and terror of armed criminal gangs, despite the considerable efforts made by the Haitian national police and the armed forces of Haiti, which remain fully mobilized on the ground with the support from the Gang Suppression Force. “

He added that Haitian the security forces have been placed on maximum high alert to gradually regain control of the areas occupied by the gangs. “And the instructions here are clear: protect, secure, and restore the authority of the state.”

Several U.N. ambassadors noted that the latest attack are unfolding against the backdrop of preparations for Haiti’s first general elections in a decade.

Eloy Alfaro de Alba, Panama’s representative, sounded a pessimistic note.

“Regrettably, the expectation of holding elections in the first half of 2027, from this point of view at least, seems not to be realistic, due to the current situation on the ground.”

This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 2:07 PM.