Foreign News
In a Haitian city ruled by gangs, young rape survivor raises baby she was told to abort
Warning: This story contains accounts of rape and other violence that readers may find distressing.
Helene was 17 years old when a gang attacked her neighbourhood in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince.
She strokes her baby daughter, asleep in her lap, while describing how armed men abducted her as she tried to flee, and held her for over two months.
“They raped me and beat me every single day. Several different men. I didn’t even know their names, they were masked,” says the young woman, whose name we have changed to protect her identity. “Some of the things they did to me are too painful to share with you.”
“I fell pregnant, they kept telling me I must abort the pregnancy and I said ‘no’. This baby could be the only one I ever have.”
She managed to escape while the gang was caught up in fighting to maintain territory. Now 19, she has spent the past year raising her daughter in a safe house in a suburb of the city.
The safe house is home to at least 30 girls and young women who sleep in bunk beds in colourfully painted rooms.
Helene is the oldest rape survivor here. The youngest is just 12. Playing and dancing on the balcony in a blue polka dot dress, she looks much younger than her age, having suffered from malnutrition in the past. Staff tell us she has been raped multiple times.
Rape and other sexual violence is surging in Haiti as armed gangs expand their control across Port-au-Prince and beyond.
The Caribbean island nation has been engulfed in a wave of gang violence since the assassination in 2021 of the then-president, Jovenel Moïse.
It is hard to measure the scale of sexual violence. Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) runs a clinic in central Port-au-Prince for women who have experienced sexual abuse. Data it has shared exclusively with the BBC shows patient numbers have nearly tripled since 2021.
The gangs are known for sweeping into neighbourhoods and killing dozens of people. MSF says multiple gang rapes of women and girls are often part of these large-scale attacks. From survivors’ accounts, it is clear that gangs have been using rape to terrorise and subjugate entire communities.
The BBC has challenged gang leaders about accounts of killings and rapes. One previously told us they do not control the actions of their members and believe they have a “duty” to fight the state. Another said “when we are fighting we are possessed – we are no longer human”.
“Patients have started to share very, very difficult stories since 2021,” says Diana Manilla Arroyo, MSF’s head of mission in Haiti.
“Survivors talk about two or four or seven, or up to 20 aggressors,” she says, adding that more women now say they have been threatened with weapons or knocked unconscious.
Women are also reporting more frequently that their assailants are under 18, she adds.
In a drop-in centre in another part of the city, four women – ranging in age from late 20s to 70 – describe being attacked in front of their children and husbands.
“Our neighbourhood was attacked, I went back home only to find my mum, my dad, my sister, all were murdered. They killed them and then burnt the house down, with them inside it,” one woman says.
After surveying her devastated home, she was about to leave the neighbourhood when she encountered gang members. “They raped me – I had my six-year-old with me. They raped her too,” she continues. “Then they killed my younger brother in front of us.”
“Whenever my daughter looks at me, she’s sad and crying.”
The other women recount attacks that follow a similar pattern – murder, rape and arson.
Sexual violence is just one element of the crisis that has engulfed Haiti. UN agencies say more than a tenth of the population – 1.3 million people – have fled their homes, and half the population faces acute hunger.
Haiti has had no elected leadership since the assassination of Moïse. A Transitional Presidential Council and a series of prime ministers it has appointed are tasked with running the country and organising elections.
Rival gangs have formed an alliance, turning their weapons on the Haitian state rather than each other.
Since we last visited in December, the situation has deteriorated. Hundreds of thousands more people have been displaced. More than 4,000 people have been killed in the first half of 2025, compared to 5,400 in the whole of 2024, according to the UN.
The gangs are estimated to have increased their control from 85% to 90% of the capital, seizing key neighbourhoods, trade routes and public infrastructure, despite efforts by a Kenyan-led, UN-backed security force.
We join the international force as they patrol a gang-controlled area, but within minutes, one of the tyres on their armoured vehicle is shot out and the operation ends.
Members of the force rarely leave their armoured vehicles. Experts say the gangs continue to acquire powerful weapons and maintain the upper hand.
In recent months, the Haitian authorities have contracted mercenaries to help wrest back control.
A source within the Haitian security forces told the BBC that private military companies, including one from the US, are operating on the ground, and using drones to attack gang leaders.
He showed us drone footage he says is of one gang leader, Ti Lapli, being targeted in an explosion. He says Ti Lapli was left in a critical condition, though the BBC has not been able to confirm this.
But around the city, the fear of the gangs remains. In many neighbourhoods, vigilante groups are taking security into their own hands, further increasing the numbers of young men with weapons on the streets.
“We’re not going to let them [the gangs] come here and kill us – steal everything we have, burn cars, burn houses, kill kids,” says a man using the name “Mike”.
He says he operates with a group in Croix-des-Prés, a bustling market area close to gang-controlled territory.
As gunfire rings out in the distance, no-one flinches. People here are used to it.
He says the gangs pay young boys to join, and set up checkpoints where they demand money from residents passing through.
“Of course everyone is afraid,” he tells us. “We feel alone trying to protect the women and children. As the gangs keep spreading, we know our area could be next.”
Humanitarian agencies say the situation is deteriorating and women are among the hardest hit, with many of them facing the double trauma of sexual violence and displacement.
Lola Castro, the regional director of the UN’s World Food Programme, says Port-au-Prince “is the worst place in the world to be a woman”.
Women here are also likely to feel the impact of cuts to humanitarian aid programmes, she adds.
Haiti has long been one of the largest recipients of funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which President Donald Trump has slashed, dubbing it “wasteful”.
When we visited in June, Ms Castro said the WFP was distributing its last stocks of US-funded food aid.
Food provision protects women, she explained, because it saves them from having to be out in the streets begging or looking for food.
Humanitarian workers here also fear that cuts may soon affect support for victims of violence in places like the safe house where Helene lives.
And Ms Manilla Arroyo from MSF says funding for contraception has also been reduced: “Many of our patients already have children. Many of them are under the age of 18 with children. The risk of pregnancy represents many, many new challenges for them.”
Helene and other women in the safe house often sit and chat together on a balcony that looks out across Port-au-Prince, but many of them are too afraid to leave the security of its walls.
She does not know how she will support her young daughter as she grows up.
“I always dreamt of going to school, to learn and to make something of myself,” she says. “I always knew I’d have children, just not this young.”
[BBC]
Hushruzjon Salohidinov, 26, was working as a courier in Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city and President Vladimir Putin’s hometown.
But last year, the Tajik man and practising Muslim says he was arrested while picking up a parcel which police claimed contained money stolen from elderly women.
Salohidinov says he never interacted with the alleged criminals, but nevertheless spent nine months in the Kresty-2 pre-trial detention centre about 32km (20 miles) from the city, while a judge refused to start his trial because of the “weak evidence” against him.
But instead of releasing him after that, prison wardens threatened to place him in a cell with HIV-infected inmates who, they said, would gang-rape him – unless he “volunteered” to fight in Ukraine.
“They said, ‘Oh, you’ll put on a skirt now, you’ll be raped,’” Salohidinov, who has raven black hair and a messy full beard, told Al Jazeera at a centre for war prisoners in northeastern Ukraine, where he is now being held, having been captured in January this year by Ukrainian forces.
Using a carrot-and-stick tactic, the wardens also promised him a sign-up bonus of 2 million rubles ($26,200), a monthly salary of 200,000 rubles ($2,620) and an amnesty from all convictions.
So, in the autumn of 2025, Salohidinov signed up as he “saw no other way out”.
Officials in Kresty-2, St Petersburg’s prosecutors’ office and Russia’s Ministry of Defence did not respond to any of Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
Hochu Jit, a Ukrainian group that helps Russian soldiers surrender, has published verified lists of thousands of Central Asian soldiers like Salohidinov.
“They are literally sent to be killed, no one considers them soldiers that need to be saved,” the group wrote in a 2025 post on Telegram. These soldiers’ life expectancy on the front line is about four months. “Losses among them are catastrophic,” the group reported.
With its low birthrate and large oil wealth, Russia has for years been a magnet for millions of labour migrants from ex-Soviet Central Asia, especially Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The campaign by the Kremlin to force Central Asians to fight in Ukraine dates back to 2023 – the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – when police began rounding up anyone who didn’t look Slavic and charging them with real or imagined transgressions such as a lack of registration, expired or “fake” permits or blurred stamps on their documents. Sometimes, migrants are simply bused straight to conscription offices.
In 2025, Al Jazeera interviewed another Tajik man who said he had been detained with an expired work permit and was then tortured into “volunteering” while being subjected to countless xenophobic and Islamophobic slurs from his officers.
Migrants say they are abused, tortured and threatened with jail or having their entire families deported.
“The main way of recruiting as many migrants as possible is pressure on them with threats of deportation,” Alisher Ilkhamov, the Uzbekistan-born head of the London-based Central Asia Due Diligence think tank, told Al Jazeera.
Sometimes, migrants are simply duped.
Salohidinov said one serviceman in his squad was an Uzbek who “didn’t speak a word of Russian” and was fooled into “volunteering” while signing papers at a migration centre.
In their reports about “catching” migrants, officials frequently use derogatory terms about them, and also when they describe men who have obtained Russian passports but skipped registration at conscription offices. Since the Soviet era, such registration has been obligatory for all men and, since 2024, a newly naturalised Russian national can lose his citizenship if he fails to do it.
“We’ve caught 80,000 such Russian citizens, who don’t just want to go to the front line, they don’t even want to go to a conscription office,” chief prosecutor Alexander Bastrykin said in May 2025, referring to the migrants’ alleged patriotic sentiments.
He boasted that 20,000 Central Asians with Russian passports were herded to the front line in 2025.
The year before, he said 10,000 Central Asians had been sent to Ukraine.
Such remarks resonate with the Russian public that lives with “a high level of xenophobia in the stage of fear and helplessness,” Sergey Biziyukin, an exiled opposition activist from the western city of Ryazan, told Al Jazeera.
“For them, such phrases from Bastrykin are a form of sedative.”
What makes Central Asians easy targets is that they hail from police states, which depend on Moscow politically and economically, observers say.
“While the migrants are frightened into signing contracts, their motherland doesn’t really pay any attention,” Galiya Ibragimova, an Uzbekistan-born, Moldova-based regional expert, told Al Jazeera.
Despite hefty signup bonuses and relentless propaganda, the number of Russians who want to fight in Ukraine fell by at least one-fifth this year, and Moscow will strive to recruit more Central Asians, she said.
After signing the contract and leaving his debit card with his sign-up bonus with his parents, Salohidinov was sent to the western city of Voronezh for three weeks of training that did little to prepare him for the war.
“We just kept running back and forth with guns,” he said.
Their drill sergeants, he says, told the conscripts that the standard-issue flak jackets, helmets, boots and flashlights were of subpar quality and urged them to pitch in a million rubles ($13,100) each for “better” gear.
The incident corroborates reports on dozens of similar cases in Russian military units.
Salohidinov was ordered to work in a kitchen – and was verbally abused and beaten for the slightest transgression.
Of 28 men in his unit, 21 were Muslims – but their ethnic Russian officers ignored their pleas not to have pork in meals, repeating a decades-old practice of ignoring religion-related dietary restrictions dating back to the Soviet army.
The commanders demonised Ukrainians, telling them “that if we surrender, we’d be tortured, have our fingers broken, maimed, get [construction] foam up our a**, have our teeth yanked out one by one, have our arms broken”, Salohidinov says.
In early January this year, the conscripts were bused to the Russia-occupied Ukrainian region of Luhansk.
Salohidinov says he was tired, frightened and disoriented – Ukrainian drones were “always” above them and a grenade explosion nearby damaged his left eardrum.
On the fourth day of his service, Salohidinov was ordered to run beyond Ukrainian positions as part of Russia’s new tactic to send two or three servicemen to infiltrate the porous front line.
The mission was suicidal because the terrain was open, dotted with landmines and the bodies of dead Russian soldiers, while Ukrainians were firing machineguns and flew drones above them.
“I ran and ran and saw we were being shot at,” he said. “Me and my commander decided to surrender voluntarily instead of dying for nothing.”
They detached their assault rifles’ magazines, raised their hands and yelled they were surrendering.
What followed was “a calm feeling, beautiful”, he said. “They fed us, let us have a smoke, gave us food and water and even cake.”
Now, Salohidinov hopes to return to Tajikistan and panics at the thought of being made part of a prisoner swap – these have taken place several times each year – and returning to Russia because he would be sent back to the front line.
Tajikistan and other Central Asian nations have never endorsed Russia’s war in Ukraine, but nor have they openly criticised it.
In August 2025, Tajikistan’s Prosecutor General Habibullo Vohidzoda declared that no Tajik national would be charged for fighting in Ukraine.
So, what Salohidinov needs right now is an extradition request.
“I’m even glad that I got captured, because I’m not fighting anyone now, not risking anything,” he said. “I’ll even say thanks to Ukraine for taking me prisoner.”
The Tajik embassy in Kyiv did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
[Aljazeera]
Iranian forces have said they struck down two fighter jets belonging to the United States military, one over the southwest part of the country and another around the Strait of Hormuz.
A spokesperson for the Iranian military’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said on Friday that air defences completely destroyed one F-15 jet. Later in the day, the Iranian military said it targeted an A-10 US aircraft that crashed into the Gulf.
The New York Times had cited unidentified officials as saying that the A10’s pilot was safe after the crash.
But the fate of at least one pilot from the downed F-15 crew is unknown. Several US media outlets reported that one crew member of the jet was located and rescued by US forces, but the other remains missing.
US President Donald Trump told NBC News on Friday that the downing of the jet will not affect the prospect of talks with Tehran. “No, not at all. No, it’s war. We’re in war,” he said.
State media outlets in Iran showed photos of the wreckage of the F-15 jet and what appears to be an ejection seat with an attached parachute.
After the jet was downed, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf mocked Trump’s repeated claims of victory in the war.
“After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’” Ghalibaf wrote in a social media post.
There was no immediate comment on the incident from the Pentagon and US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees military operations in the Middle East and much of Asia.
[Aljazeera]
United States President Donald Trump has announced that Pam Bondi is out as US attorney general, in his second major cabinet-level shake-up in less than a month.
Trump confirmed the decision in a post on Truth Social on Thursday, after a slate of media reports suggested he was considering removing Bondi from the top law enforcement role. Several cited his discontent over Bondi’s handling of investigative files related to financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will temporarily replace Bondi in an interim capacity, he said.
“Pam Bondi is a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend, who faithfully served as my Attorney General over the past year,” Trump wrote.
The US president also praised Bondi for leading the Department of Justice during a period when violent crime decreased in the US, part of a wider downward trend in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump did not mention his reasoning for the decision, instead writing, “We love Pam.” He added that she would be “transitioning to a much-needed and important new job in the private sector”.
In a statement, Bondi said she would be transitioning the office to Blanche over the next month, adding she was moving to “an important private sector role I am thrilled about, and where I will continue fighting for President Trump and this Administration”.
“I remain eternally grateful for the trust that President Trump placed in me to Make America Safe Again,” she said.
Bondi’s dismissal comes shortly after Trump abruptly fired Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversaw the agency amid a mass deportation campaign that led to the killing of two US citizens.
[Aljazeera]
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