Gang Gunfire in Haiti Hits U.S. Embassy Vehicles and U.N. Helicopter

The attacks this week point to an escalation of violence as the situation worsens and gangs overwhelm security forces, including a multinational force.

Armed gangs in Haiti opened fire on U.S. Embassy vehicles and a United Nations helicopter this week, an escalation of attacks as criminal groups overwhelm security forces in the country — including an international mission charged with taking on the gangs.

The helicopter was hit in midair by gunfire on Thursday while flying over the capital, Port-au-Prince, a U.N. official said. It was carrying three crew members and 15 passengers.

No one was injured, and the helicopter landed safely, according to the official, Arnaud Royer, the head of the U.N. human rights office in Haiti. The helicopter is used by the U.N.’s World Food Program to deliver humanitarian aid to Haitians, many living in communities cut off by gangs.

On Monday, gangs fired on two U.S. Embassy vehicles traveling in Port-au-Prince. A State Department spokeswoman confirmed that no workers were injured. Officials told The Times that some two dozen embassy employees would be evacuated.

“The United States strongly condemns ongoing gang violence in Port-au-Prince aimed at destabilizing the government,” Brian A. Nichols, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in a statement after the attack on Monday. “Those responsible will be held to account by Haitian and international authorities.”

In an effort to restore order to the gang-ravaged country, a multinational security force was deployed to Haiti in June. The mission, made up so far of about 430 Kenyan, Jamaican, Bahamian and Belizean officers, is meant to act as reinforcement for the outgunned, underfunded and severely underpaid Haitian police.

Some progress has been made.

The Port-au-Prince airport has reopened. Many street vendors are back working in some parts of the capital. Gang members have been pushed out of Port-au-Prince’s main public hospital, though it remains closed. And the Haitian police have re-entered parts of the city they had abandoned.

Still, experts question whether these improvements show the multinational force’s success or are the result of a pause in hostilities among some armed groups.

What’s clear is that months into its deployment, the multinational security force “is not having a material impact on the security situation,” said Alexandra Filippova, a senior staff attorney at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a legal advocacy group. “People remain in deep fear.”

More than 10,000 people were displaced in the past week after armed attacks in and around Port-au-Prince, according to a report by the United Nations’ migration agency. And over 700,000 people in the capital have been unable to return to their homes after gangs attacked their neighborhoods.

“The situation in Haiti has, regrettably, worsened,” María Isabel Salvador, who leads the U.N. mission in the country, told the United Nations Security Council this week. In the past three months, she added, killings, rapes and kidnappings have increased and expanded beyond Port-au-Prince.

A central issue, said William O’Neill, the U.N.’s human rights expert on Haiti, is that there are not enough police officers or multinational force members to confront heavily armed gangs.

“It’s whack a mole,” Mr. O’Neill said, adding that he feared the attack on the helicopter could prompt the United Nations to stop humanitarian flights.

Haiti’s southern peninsula, home to three million people, is essentially being held hostage by a gang coalition of roughly 1,000 members, he added, “half of them teenagers.’’

The international mission also does not seem to have a clear strategy for taking on the gangs, some experts said.

While it is far too soon to call the deployment a failure, it needs to quickly “get its act together,’’ said Rosy Auguste Ducéna, a lawyer and program director of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network, a human rights group.

Jack Ombaka, a spokesman for the multinational force, declined to comment.

The gangs have also ramped up attacks in areas outside Port-au-Prince where the police presence is minimal.

In one particularly horrific episode, a gang massacre this month in the small agricultural town of Pont-Sondé, in central Haiti, killed at least 88 people. Entire families, including children, were wiped out, a human rights group said, and more than 6,700 people fled their homes.

Haiti’s estimated 200 gangs — from small, ill-equipped groups to professional, hierarchal organizations — have varying interests and motivations, experts say.

Some have become involved with transnational criminal networks to traffic arms and drugs. Others seem to want to exert political influence, mimicking how several of these groups originated: as paramilitary groups used by political actors in Haiti to preserve power.

Beyond the intensifying violence, it is unclear why the U.N. helicopter and the U.S. Embassy vehicles were targeted, experts said. But the attacks underscore the chaos and lack of governmental control in the country.

A transition council running Haiti is supposed to pave the way for a presidential election — the previous president was assassinated more than three years ago. But the council has been by hampered by internal conflicts and accusations of corruption.

“Haiti’s crisis is a crisis of governance overlaid with insecurity,” Ms. Filippova, of the Institute for Justice and Democracy, said. “And so you can’t end the insecurity unless you address the governance.”

David C. Adams and Andre Paultre contributed reporting.