San Salvador [El Salvador], October 29: Around 1,000 soldiers from El Salvador have been sent to Haiti after four Salvadoran members of a UN-backed force went missing during a gang ambush on the outskirts of the capital Port-au-Prince.
This was confirmed by a security official in told Reuters on Tuesday.
It remains unclear who will command the new Salvadoran contingent, which arrived in a series of flights following the October 18 ambush, how long it will operate in the Caribbean country and how many more soldiers could still be deployed.
The Haitian and Salvadoran governments did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The security official in Haiti spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive security situation.
The surge in deployments comes as the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force has reached about 2,000 troops - just over a third of the planned size a year into its mandate - with limited impacts on Haitian security.
GSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Armed gangs in Haiti have for years expanded their influence over the capital and surrounding regions through extortion and brutal attacks that have displaced nearly 1.5 million people and battered its economy and institutions.
Haiti's leadership has since 2022 requested international security support, despite a difficult history of foreign interventions, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise a year before led to a sharp rise in gang violence and left a power vacuum.
Successive transitional leaders have since postponed elections due to the violence, and lawmakers' terms were left to expire.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele last week announced a military operation to recover the missing Salvadorans, who have been unaccounted for since leaping from a burning vehicle during an ambush, but did not disclose how many troops he would send.
A US military official said the US Southern Command had provided C-130 military transport to partially help bring the Salvadoran troops to Haiti.
Other flights between San Salvador and Port-au-Prince, both commercial and military, have appeared on tracking website Flightradar24 and some were reported by the Miami Herald.
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Corporation
