Vigilantes defending Haiti neighbourhood ‘tooth and nail’ against gang attacks

Published

1 year ago

March 24, 2024

admin

For us, every day in Port-au-Prince starts with a situation report on the latest outbreak of fighting in this beleaguered capital city.

It’s often near the presidential palace and government buildings in the downtown district, but in truth it can be anywhere – nowhere feels safe.

Every day as we drive around town we see bodies on the road. Cars, motorcycles and buses don’t stop, and people step around the dead.

Sometimes the bodies are covered with sheets, sometimes they are set on fire, and sometimes they just lie there in the blistering heat.

Families often don’t retrieve their loved ones because they don’t have the money to pay for a burial.

Their hope is that passing NGOs or government workers will take the bodies away.

Nobody knows the reasons for mystery murders

On one street a man has been shot, with a tyre placed in front of his body so vehicles don’t drive over him.

On another street, a man and a woman have been killed. They were riding a motorcycle when they were shot. The woman was still holding a bag of rice in her hand.

And on a street just up the road from that scene, I watched a mother walking with her young daughter. They passed a charred and still-burning body of a woman killed overnight.

They didn’t pay much attention to the scene that would shock anybody anywhere else. But not in Port-au-Prince.

Nobody knows why these murders happened.

A city where quiet means danger

Society is inured to the horror of life here, where the bodies are just the grisly manifestation of the shooting one can hear echoing around the city every day.

Driving in Port-au-Prince is sometimes challenging. Motorcycles, tuk-tuks, cars and lorries jostle for position on decrepit, narrow roads.

When the roads go quiet, you know instinctively you are in a dangerous place.

The main road to the international airport is dangerous and tense – few cars travel on it anymore.

The airport is guarded by the military. It’s the only place they are visible. We drive up to the main entrance past soldiers and their vehicles.

The airport is completely closed. There is not a plane in sight, the control tower is shut, and the airport zone in general is deadly quiet.

The overwhelming sense you get here is of a capital city not only cut off from the rest of the country, but cut off from the rest of the world.

It’s a siege from within if you like, and everyone is a prisoner.

Vigilantes fighting back night and day

Neighbourhood after neighbourhood is barricaded off with vehicles, sandbags, concrete blocks, old fridges, barbed wire, tree trunks… they use whatever they can find.

Some of the areas are gang territories and others are communities trying to protect themselves.

Through the barricades, we were given permission to enter a place called Solino, a community of 10,000 people that has been attacked by two separate gangs for over a year now. They’re trying to take it over.

At least 80% of Port-au-Prince has fallen to the gangs – but it’s not happening in this neighbourhood because Solino is protected by armed vigilantes and off-duty police officers who live here and fight them together.

We’re told to wear our body armour and helmets because the fighting can start at any moment.

An off-duty police officer guides us on foot towards another barricade that protects neighbourhoods. This barricade is piled high with sandbags. On the other side is the territory of two different gangs.

It is that close.

The homes and the streets on the frontline are deserted, and although the homes burnt out by the gangs have been taken back, they’re uninhabitable – it’s simply too dangerous.

Regular attacks kill men on both sides, but this vigilante group is holding on in this turf war.

They believe they will win – or rather, they hope they will.

None of the men I speak to want to show their faces or give their names, though they are happy to talk.

Wearing a black balaclava to cover up, one of the civilians who has joined the group to protect the community told me they’re doing everything they can to protect their community.

“This may look like a ghetto to you, but it’s not. There are engineers and doctors who live here, it’s a nice area,” he said.

He feels passionately that they can and must hold the gangs back, not least because Solino is considered by the gangs to be a gateway to the areas of Port-au-Prince they haven’t yet taken.

“It’s us citizens along with the police officers who are controlling this area, without them we wouldn’t have what you see here today in Solino, and we continue to fight tooth and nail, night and day, to protect the area,” he said.

“We have families who have left the area, but those who remain give their heart and soul for the freedom of the neighbourhood, and the freedom of this country.”

World

Trump announces weapons deal with NATO to help Ukraine – as he gives Putin 50-day ultimatum

Published

8 hours ago

July 14, 2025

admin

Trump announces weapons deal with NATO to help Ukraine - as he gives Putin 50-day ultimatum

Donald Trump has agreed to send “top of the line weapons” to NATO to support Ukraine – and threatened Russia with “severe” tariffs if it doesn’t agree to end the war.

Speaking with NATO secretary general Mark Rutte during a meeting at the White House, the US president said: “We’ve made a deal today where we are going to be sending them weapons, and they’re going to be paying for them.

“This is billions of dollars worth of military equipment which is going to be purchased from the United States,” he added, “going to NATO, and that’s going to be quickly distributed to the battlefield.”

Follow the latest here

Weapons being sent include surface-to-air Patriot missile systems and batteries, which Ukraine has asked for to defend itself from Russian air strikes.

Mr Trump also said he was “very unhappy” with Russia, and threatened “severe tariffs” of “about 100%” if there isn’t a deal to end the war in Ukraine within 50 days.

The White House added that the US would put “secondary sanctions” on countries that buy oil from Russia if an agreement was not reached.

It comes after weeks of frustration from Mr Trump against Vladimir Putin’s refusal to agree to an end to the conflict, with the Russian leader telling the US president he would “not back down” from Moscow’s goals in Ukraine at the start of the month.

During the briefing on Monday, Mr Trump said he had held calls with Mr Putin where he would think “that was a nice phone call,” but then “missiles are launched into Kyiv or some other city, and that happens three or four times”.

“I don’t want to say he’s an assassin, but he’s a tough guy,” he added.

Earlier this year, Mr Trump told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy “you’re gambling with World War Three” in a fiery White House meeting, and suggested Ukraine started the war against Russia as he sought to negotiate an end to the conflict.

After Mr Trump’s briefing, Russian senator Konstantin Kosachev said on Telegram: “If this is all that Trump had in mind to say about Ukraine today, then all the steam has gone out.”

Meanwhile, Mr Zelenskyy met with US special envoy Keith Kellogg in Kyiv, where they “discussed the path to peace” by “strengthening Ukraine’s air defence, joint production, and procurement of defence weapons in collaboration with Europe”.

He thanked both the envoy for the visit and Mr Trump “for the important signals of support and the positive decisions for both our countries”.

World

At least 30 dead and 100 injured as armed groups clash in Syria, officials say

Published

20 hours ago

July 14, 2025

admin

At least 30 dead and 100 injured as armed groups clash in Syria, officials say

At least 30 people have been killed in the Syrian city of Sweida in clashes between local military groups and tribes, according to Syria’s interior ministry.

Officials say initial figures suggest around 100 people have also been injured in the city, where the Druze faith is one of the major religious groups.

The interior ministry said its forces will directly intervene to resolve the conflict, which the Reuters news agency said involved fighting between Druze gunmen and Bedouin Sunni tribes.

It marks the latest episode of sectarian violence in Syria, where fears among minority groups have increased since Islamist-led rebels toppled President Bashar al Assad in December, installing their own government and security forces.

The violence reportedly erupted after a wave of kidnappings, including the abduction of a Druze merchant on Friday on the highway linking Damascus to Sweida.

Last April, Sunni militia clashed with armed Druze residents of Jaramana, southeast of Damascus, and fighting later spread to another district near the capital.

But this is the first time the fighting has been reported inside the city of Sweida itself, the provincial capital of the mostly Druze province.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reports the fighting was centred in the Maqwas neighbourhood east of Sweida and villages on the western and northern outskirts of the city.

It adds that Syria’s Ministry of Defence has deployed military convoys to the area.

Western nations, including the US and UK, have been increasingly moving towards normalising relations with Syria.

Concerns among minority groups have intensified following the killing of hundreds of Alawites in March, in apparent retaliation for an earlier attack carried out by Assad loyalists.

That was the deadliest sectarian flare-up in years in Syria, where a 14-year civil war ended with Assad fleeing to Russia after his government was overthrown by rebel forces.

The city of Sweida is in southern Syria, about 24 miles (38km) north of the border with Jordan.

World

Meredith Kercher’s killer faces new trial over sexual assault allegations

Published

1 day ago

July 13, 2025

admin

Meredith Kercher's killer faces new trial over sexual assault allegations

The man convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher has been charged with sexual assault against an ex-girlfriend.

Rudy Guede, 38, was the only person who was definitively convicted of the murder of 21-year-old Ms Kercher in Perugia, Italy, back in 2007.

He will be standing trial again in November after an ex-girlfriend filed a police report in the summer of 2023 accusing Guede of mistreatment, personal injury and sexual violence.

Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was released from prison for the murder of Leeds University student Ms Kercher in 2021, after having served about 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

Since last year – when this investigation was still ongoing – Guede has been under a “special surveillance” regime, Sky News understands, meaning he was banned from having any contact with the woman behind the sexual assault allegations, including via social media, and had to inform police any time he left his city of residence, Viterbo, as ruled by a Rome court.

Guede has been serving a restraining order and fitted with an electronic ankle tag.

The Kercher murder case, in the university city of Perugia, was the subject of international attention.

Ms Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student, was found murdered in the flat she shared with her American roommate, Amanda Knox.

The Briton’s throat had been cut and she had been stabbed 47 times.