UNITED NATIONS, United States (AFP) —Violence-ravaged Haiti is a nation “at war,” its leader Laurent Saint-Cyr warned at the United Nations on Thursday, as he appealed for help from the international community to defeat gangs that have overrun the Caribbean country.

“Every day, innocent lives are snuffed out by bullets, fire and fear. Entire neighborhoods are disappearing, forcing more than a million people into internal exile and reducing to nothing memories, investments, and infrastructure,” said Saint-Cyr, who heads the Haitian Transitional Presidential Council.

“Thousands of young people are condemned to despair, hundreds of girls and women subjected to rape will forever carry the physical and psychological scars of violence,” he said in a speech to the UN’s General Assembly.

He described how Haitian hospitals were being vandalized or set on fire, and how doctors were being forced to flee, with lives lost due to a lack of medical care.

“This is the face of Haiti today, a country at war, a contemporary Guernica, a human tragedy on America’s doorstep — just a four-hour flight from here,” he said during his speech in French.

In an effort to curb the atrocities committed by gangs that took over nearly all of the capital Port-au-Prince, the UN Security Council in 2023 approved the Multinational Security Mission, led by Kenya.

But the under-equipped and underfunded force has deployed only 1,000 police officers and troops out of the 2,500 initially hoped for, and its results have been mixed.

Washington has responded by pushing to transform it into a gang suppression force of more than 5,500 personnel, consisting of both police and military forces.

Saint-Cyr has thrown his support behind the plan, and on Thursday he emphasized the risks of the Haitian crisis spreading.

“Haiti stands at the epicenter of an unprecedented regional threat. Powerful and heavily armed criminal networks are seeking to destabilize the country and dominate the economies of our entire shared space,” he said.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, has long suffered from criminal gang violence, with murders, rapes, looting, and kidnappings prevalent against a backdrop of chronic political instability.

The situation significantly worsened at the start of 2024, when the gangs drove then-prime minister Ariel Henry to resign.