No end to agony as gangs shift focus to elite 'safe' areas

As gang fighters and police battled outside his home near Haiti's beleaguered capital late last month, Nielsen Daily Fierrier hurled himself to the ground.

- Tom Phillips and Etienne Cété-Paluck

"From six in the morning until six in the evening, the gunfire hardly stopped," said the 25-year-old electrician from PétionVille, a middle-class suburb in the hills south of Port-au-Prince.

"All afternoon, there was non-stop shooting," Fierrier said of the clashes, in which several neighbours were wounded and one local man killed.

A month after a coalition of criminal groups called "Viv Ansanm" (Live Together) plunged Haiti's capital into chaos with an audacious offensive against the state, the fighting continues and in recent days has begun shifting to places long considered oases of calm. The reason for that migration into areas such as Pétion-Ville, Laboule and Thomasin is unclear.

Amy Wilentz, an American journalist who has covered Haiti for nearly four decades, suspected the highly unusual attacks were designed to intimidate members of Haiti's political and economic elite who lived in such enclaves and might be part of a future government after Ariel Henry, the prime minister, was forced to resign by the gang insurrection. "It's very calculated... and it's very frightening," she said.