A day after a planeload of 200 Kenyans arrived in Haiti to help rescue the Caribbean nation from the tightening grip of heavily armed criminal gangs, Garry Conille, the newly installed prime minister, stood under a searing sun at their command center and issued a warning to those wreaking havoc and fueling chaos.

“We will reclaim control of the country, house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city,” Conille said Wednesday as his new police chief, Rameau Normil, stood to the side along with the head of the Kenya-led armed security force.

Conille’s statement raised already high expectations that the foreign forces, working with Haitian police, will dismantle Haitian gangs. It also seemed to set the stage for a confrontation between the criminal gangs now controlling more than 80% of Port-au-Prince, and the long-awaited United Nations-backed mission.

But just hours after his warning, members of the 400 Mawozo gang set fire to an already abandoned town hall in the town of Croix-des-Bouquets, a sprawling suburb east of the Kenyans’ base on the grounds of the Port-au-Prince international airport.

The clashing optics show not just how high the stakes are in the fight to wrest control of Haiti back from its estimated 200 to 300 armed gangs, but how months into the insurrection that helped force the ouster of the previous government, no one knows how the mission will unfold.

As some of the specialized Kenyan officers took to the streets for the first time Friday, accompanying Haitian SWAT members on a patrol of the capital’s gang-decimated downtown, many questions remain. Are the reinforcements enough to turn the tide and stabilize a nation long in turmoil?

“It’s a very heavy lift, there’s no question,” Keith Mines, vice president of the Latin America program at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington said of the task ahead. “Tentatively, I want to hope for the best but it’s a real razor’s edge that they are walking on.”

For now, there are 200 Kenyans in country with another wave expected in less than two weeks. No timeline has been given for the deployment of other contingents from the Caribbean and other African nations, which have also volunteered.

Kenya has estimated that the mission, which was approved by the U.N. Security Council in October for a year, will cost $600 million. But a trust fund, administered by the U.N., has only amassed $21 million. So far, the Biden administration is the largest financial contributor, providing over $300 million for armored vehicles, training reimbursement and construction of the base, which Conille visited amid an eerie and precarious calm over the capital after months of daily automatic gunfire and threats by gang leaders to block the deployment.

Funding isn’t the mission’s only problem. Though the forces are slated to grow to 2,500, the current base can only accommodate up to about 450 people, according to those in the know, which raises questions about how many foreign troops will actually be on the ground at one time. The capacity constraints, the limited resources and the number of foreign troops now being allowed to participate because of the lack of money, make for a very challenging situation, said Mines. Still, there is some positive momentum, he said, citing Conille’s ongoing public outreach efforts.

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