THE FIRST contingent of United Nations-backed foreign police have arrived in Haiti, nearly two years after the troubled Caribbean country urgently requested help to quell a surge in gang violence.

Some 200 police officers from Kenya landed on Tuesday in the capital Port-au-Prince, whose main international airport reopened in late May after the violence forced its closure for nearly three months.

It wasn’t immediately known what the Kenyans’ first assignment would be, but they will face violent criminal organisations that control 80 per cent of Haiti’s capital and have left more than 580,000 people homeless across the country as they pillage neighbourhoods in a quest to control more territory. Gangs have also killed several thousand people in recent years.