Hundreds of Kenyan police officers have returned to their home country as the mission seeking to address gang violence in Haiti draws to a close, making room for another phase of international intervention.
The Miami Herald noted that over 200 Kenyan police officers returned to Nairobi last week, with the country's interior ministry saying that the "mission has now entered a transition and drawdown phase that will see more officers gradually return home from their tour of duty."
Some officers will remain in the country to serve as a point of connection with the new Gang Suppression Force, which is expected to arrive in the country in April and have as much as 5,500 members.
The Kenyan mission was supposed to deploy some 2,500 officers, but only managed to have 1,100 at the same time, the Herald noted. Three officers died in the 21 months the mission lasted.
The country is not expected to take part in the new force, which, according to a U.S. official, will be much more lethal than the prior one.
The U.S.'s chargé d'affaires in Hait, Henry Wooster, said last year that the mission will be military oriented "due to the urban combat nature of it."
Wooster went on to say that the force would initially seek to secure "places such as the airport, the seaports, key road junctures, power plants, etc, and so forth, all the things where a state, any state needs to assert its authority to establish the fact that it is, in fact, a sovereign enterprise."
The official said the approach resembles the need to save a dying patient: "I liken it to an emergency room that gets a patient who comes in, who's been very severely injured, and while you know they've got contusions, maybe a concussion, and they've got a broken leg and lacerations, you've got to stop the bleeding immediately. You can't let them bleed out."
Wooster then said the force would have more "freedom of maneuver" than the current one. "Exactly what is at stake here is a fight for the survival of a sovereign entity, the Haitian state," he warned.
In the meantime, Haitian forces have managed to gain ground on gangs by using drones. In January, specialized Haitian police units, supported by a drone task force, entered the gang-controlled Delmas 6 neighborhood of Port-au-Prince with the goal of destroying a safehouse belonging to the leader and spokesperson
The Miami Herald noted that the drone task force was hired by Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, who now runs the executive branch, and operates under the supervision of U.S.-based private security firm Vectus Global, founded by Erik Prince, the former CEO of military contractor Blackwater.
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