Forty-seven dead. More than fifty people taken away. Late on a Sunday, armed men swept into Kenscoff, a farming community in the hills above Port-au-Prince, and by the weekend’s end the UN was counting the bodies.
At least five of the dead were children, according to BINUH, the UN’s integrated office in Haiti. Kenscoff’s mayor, Jean Massillon, said two government employees were also killed, one of them his cousin, who served as his security detail. Members of Viv Ansanm, the gang coalition the US has designated a foreign terrorist organisation, also burned 25 homes, he said.
More than 2,600 people have been displaced, the UN’s International Organization for Migration says. Families across the area now wait to learn whether they can go home.
A hostage threat
The kidnapped are the most urgent worry. In a video posted on social media, a gang leader who calls himself Izo 2 warned police chief Vladimir Paraison against using drones on the gangs in the area. “Paraison, if any of our soldiers are hurt, I will kill all of them,” he said, meaning the hostages.
Romain Le Cour, who heads the Haiti observatory at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, says Izo 2, also known as Didi, runs what he called “a kind of franchise cell” for Izo, the gang figure Johnson André, and other leaders. Le Cour sees a calculation behind the raid: force a thinly stretched police and UN-backed suppression force to pull resources from elsewhere. It may also be a message ahead of the 13 December general elections, the first in more than a decade. “The gangs are saying: when we choose to attack, we can, and we will succeed,” he said.
Questions for the police
Some survivors say the government left them exposed. Police reject that. Haiti’s National Police spokesperson, Garry Desrosiers, took only a handful of questions at a news conference on Thursday. Asked what police intend to do for the hostages, he answered, “We cannot talk about any plans.” On intelligence before the attack, he said only that authorities had been gathering it. He added that police know one gang leader is threatening Tabarre, the Port-au-Prince neighborhood that houses the US embassy.
Paraison did not attend. He has said an investigation is under way to establish the truth about the attack “whether due to complicity or negligence.”
The timing stings. Security operations had cut violence in Kenscoff by 66 percent between January and August, according to the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data. The first major attack on the community came in January 2025, followed by sporadic raids in the surrounding mountains, but this one was the largest yet. Le Cour was blunt about the police posture: if officers and armoured vehicles really were stationed there, “You let the gangs come in even if you had everything in place?”
Massillon said gangs still roam the edges of Kenscoff. He told reporters he remains hopeful the state will keep working to root them out.
Across Haiti, gangs control an estimated 70 percent of Port-au-Prince. A record 1.5 million people have fled their homes, and UN statistics show more than 3,050 people killed from January to June.
Sources
- Haitians demand answers from police after gangs kill 47, kidnap more than 50
- At least 47 killed and dozens kidnapped in gang attack near Haiti capital
