N'DJAMENA - Chad has announced plans to deploy 800 police officers and gendarmes to Haiti during the current year to participate in the U.N.-backed Gang Suppression Force, a senior Chadian police official told Reuters. The official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorised to speak publicly, said the Chadian personnel are expected to be in Haiti by June.
According to the anonymous official, the contingent will travel to Haiti after receiving training from "European and American partners". The precise locations and timelines for that training were not specified by the official in the interview.
Dominican Republic Foreign Minister Roberto Alvarez said this week that the Gang Suppression Force, which has U.N. backing, is expected to reach its full designated capacity of 5,500 personnel by October. Alvarez also indicated that Kenyan police, who deployed to Haiti under an earlier model of the multinational security effort, should withdraw on a gradual basis as the new force takes shape.
Alvarez told reporters after a meeting with U.S. officials that the Chadian forces were being trained in the United States. That account was directly contradicted by a U.S. State Department spokesperson, who thanked Chad for its pledged contribution but stated, "Chadian troops are not training in the United States."
The Gang Suppression Force was introduced as a larger successor to the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission. Since the Gang Suppression Force was approved last September, however, no significant new deployments have arrived to bolster the mission's ranks.
At present, the force on the ground is composed predominantly of Kenyan police, accompanied by smaller contingents from a handful of countries in Central America and the Caribbean. In October 2023, Chad informed the United Nations that it was willing to contribute troops and police to the MSS, though at that time it did not provide specific numbers or a deployment timeline. The U.N. also received pledges then from Benin and Bangladesh; none of those pledged forces have deployed to date.
Context limitations: The Chadian official did not provide additional operational details, and there are conflicting public statements about the location of training for the pledged forces.