On October 27, 2026, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed the deployment of approximately 1,000 additional military personnel to Haiti, launching a large-scale search operation for four of the country’s air force technicians who disappeared during a violent gang ambush outside Port-au-Prince on October 18. The four service members, who were assigned to the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF), were forced to jump from their burning armored vehicle when the convoy came under coordinated attack, and no trace of them has been recovered in the days since the incident. No armed group has publicly claimed responsibility for the ambush to date, and Wilson Joseph, the leader of the notorious 400 Mawozo gang that controls large swathes of Port-au-Prince, has released multiple public video statements explicitly denying that his faction is holding the missing Salvadoran troops or played any role in the assault. Prior to this incident, El Salvador had stationed only 124 personnel in Haiti as part of the GSF contingent, per official UN documentation, a deployment that Bukele previously framed as a non-combat force consisting exclusively of pilots and maintenance technicians tasked with evacuating wounded GSF service members rather than engaging in frontline counter-gang operations. The UN-backed GSF, established to curb Haiti’s spiraling gang violence, has fallen drastically short of its mandated strength one full year after its official launch: the force currently counts just 2,000 active troops, barely 34 percent of its original 6,000-person target, and its operations have yielded minimal tangible improvements to national security. Haiti continues to face cascading humanitarian and governance crises, with armed gangs now controlling more than 60 percent of Port-au-Prince, nearly 1.5 million people internally displaced by ongoing conflict, and the country’s transitional governing body repeatedly delaying long-promised national elections due to pervasive insecurity. A senior U.S. military official confirmed to Reuters that the U.S. Department of Defense provided C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft to airlift the bulk of El Salvador’s newly deployed troops to Haitian territory to support the search and recovery mission.