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2 direct mentions across 2 briefings, with 3 linked developments.
Latest linked intelligence
Bélizaire may not remain in office because he received support from only four of the council’s nine members.
Assessment development · updated through
Bélizaire may not remain in office because he received support from only four of the council’s nine members.
Open source reportGeography
Marker precision is disclosed on selection. Country and regional centroids show geographic scope, not an exact incident site.
Haiti transitional council dossier
3 mapped developments across 1 map positions. Centroid markers show geographic scope, not an exact incident site.
Port-au-Prince
Haiti installed a transitional council and Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned in absentia. Gunfire during the swearing-in; gang violence threatens the council’s mandate to organize elections and inaugurate a president by February 2026.
Approximate map position: country centroid. The extracted place did not have provider-resolved coordinates.
1 supporting public source attached
Chronology
Off Leash update 1 May Russia •Finland's national airline, Finnair, reported that some of its recent flights were interrupted because of radar jams hear the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. •Russia seems to be responsible for the jams, but - as The Economist explains - its interference is probably more defensive than nefarious: Kaliningrad is heavily militarized, and the jams are probably designed to scramble Ukrainian attack drones targeting Russian military sites there. Gaza •SecState Blinken will meet PM Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials today, and is expected to press them to speed up aid shipments to Gaza. •Blinken and other diplomats have been encouraging Israel to stall its ground invasion of Rafah to improve odds for a ceasefire deal, but Netanyahu reaffirmed that the Rafah operation will go ahead "with or without" a deal. •Separately, the UN's International Court of Justice rejected Nicaragua's case against Germany for shipping weapons to Israel. China •China's latest and most advanced aircraft carrier, the Fujian, left the Jiangnan Shipyard for its first sea trials. Following the trials, the 80,000-ton Fujian will become the third carrier in China's fleet, after the 66,000-ton Shandong and the 60,000-ton Liaoning. Haiti •Haiti's new transitional council selected little-known former sports minister Fritz Bélizaire to be the country's new interim prime minister as it tries to root out gangs and establish a stable government. •Bélizaire replaced Michel Patrick Boisvert, who became interim PM only last week when the council formally took over from ousted (and unelected) PM Henry. •Bélizaire may not last long either: he only won the support of four of the council's nine members, and the other five indicated they didn't know him well enough to appoint him. DRC •UN peacekeepers ended operations in South Kivu for good this week, leaving MONUSCO active in only North Kivu and Ituri provinces - which are currently facing worse violence than South Kivu. By the end of the year, the UN's longest and costliest peacekeeping mission will fully wind down and exit DRC. Sahel •Mali said its forces - along with Tuareg fighters - killed Islamic State commander Abu Huzeifa (aka Higgo), who planned the 2017 attack that killed four U.S. troops in Tongo Tongo, Niger. •The operation took place in Liptako, which is where the porous borders of three junta-run countries - Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger - meet. •Its success is a strategic win for the three juntas, who recently banded together (with Russian support) to form the anti-extremist Alliance of Sahel States after they were evicted from the regional ECOWAS bloc following their coups. Sudan •Amidst the looming spectre of a second genocide in Darfur, the U.S. asked the UAE and other allies to stop arming the Rapid Support Forces. (The UAE insists it "is not supplying any arms or ammunition to any faction engaged in the ongoing conflict in Sudan," but evidence suggests it actually is.) Yemen •Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed a drone strike on a container ship in the Red Sea on Friday, and yesterday authorities confirmed their claim. •The ship they struck was the Portuguese-flagged MSC Orion, and this was their longest-range confirmed strike yet: it occurred around 375 miles (600 km) off the coast of Yemen. •The Orion sustained only minor damage and continued its voyage. Afghanistan •Islamic State (IS) claimed Monday's attack at a Shia mosque in Herat that killed six, including the imam. IS is the main instigator of anti-Shia attacks in Afghanistan, so its claim wasn't a surprise. 1/2
Open source reportOff Leash Update 26 April Gaza •The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building a floating pier off the coast of Gaza to facilitate aid deliveries by circumventing delays delivering aid by land routes. It will take a few weeks to finish the pier, which will be able to receive up to two million meals per day. •The additional food aid will be most welcome in northern Gaza, where the UN's Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative is anticipating only its third ever classified famine in Gaza by late May (the first two were in 2011 in parts of Somalia, and in 2017 in South Sudan). •Gazan health officials said they discovered more bodies in a mass grave on the site of a hospital, bringing the total number of bodies unearthed there to 392. Israeli officials rejected suggestions that Israeli troops were responsible for the victims' deaths. •Separately, local media reported that Israel is now willing to accept the release of just 20 hostages - down from 40 - in exchange for a temporary ceasefire deal. The report is unconfirmed, and other citations say 33 is the minimum number of hostages Israel would accept for a deal. •Meanwhile, Pres. Biden and 17 other world leaders are trying a very different approach: asking Hamas nicely to release all remaining hostages. Haiti •Haiti installed a new transitional council, and PM Henry formally resigned in absentia - as he'd promised to do once the council was in place. •The gunshots that rang out in the background as council members took their oaths of office offered a preview of the tough task that lies ahead of them: the council has a deadline of February 2026 to organize elections and inaugurate a new president, but rampant gang violence threatens to derail their work. Sahel •The U.S. is withdrawing the ~75 Army Special Operations troops it has stationed in Chad after Chad's government asked them to leave. •The U.S. and Chad were in the process of renegotiating their security cooperation terms - and U.S. officials still hold out hope that talks will continue on May 6 - but Chad wanted better terms than the U.S. could apparently offer it. •Russia has been making rival security deals with other Sahel countries (including Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso) lately, and may be talking to Chad now, too. Iran •Iran sentenced Toomaj Salehi - a rebellious rapper - to death for "spreading corruption on earth" by making music that celebrated antigovernment protests. Salehi plans to appeal. Yemen •A UK Royal Navy destroyer downed a Houthi ballistic missile targeting a commercial ship in the Red Sea, marking the first time since the Gulf War that a UK ship-launched anti-air missile successfully intercepted an adversary's missile mid-air. South Sudan •According to Bloomberg, a little-known (and poorly acronymed) Emirati company - Hamad Bin Khalifa Department of Projects (HBKDOP) - struck a deal to lend South Sudan 12 billion euros ($12.9 billion) in exchange for future oil production. •The huge size of the deal means HBKDOP could receive essentially all of South Sudan's oil flows as repayments. Other News •Extreme rains caused heavy flooding in east Africa, and at least 200 people have died in the deluge. Tanzania, Kenya, and Burundi were the hardest hit.
Open source report