Shifting tides: How the Iran war is reviving Somali piracy

Mogadishu, Somalia - Pirates hijacked MT Asana, a Tanzanian-flagged oil tanker, on 17 July, boarding it about 65 nautical miles off the Yemeni port of Mukalla.

The tanker was moving slowly toward Somalia when a gunman was spotted near the bridge. EU naval officials soon concluded he was not acting alone.

The MT Asana is the fourth ship suspected pirates have hijacked off Somalia since April, in a crisis that has triggered renewed fears about maritime security around the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea region. 

Piracy off the Horn of Africa cost more than $400 million in ransom payments between 2005 and 2012, according to a joint study by Interpol, the United Nations, and the World Bank, which recorded 179 ships hijacked over that period before an international coalition brought the crisis under control.

At the height of that earlier crisis, in 2010 alone, pirates hijacked 53 vessels and took 1,090 crew hostage, according to a report by the advocacy group Oceans Beyond Piracy. By June the following year, it counted more than 500 seafarers still being held at once.

The last time there was an uptick in incidents, from 2011 to 2016, it took a large multinational naval coalition to beat it back, made up of NATO’s Operation Ocean Shield, the EU’s Operation Atalanta, and a British-led task force called Combined Task Force 151.

The incidents also reshaped the region, prompting Japan, Italy and eventually China to establish military bases in Djibouti, whose coastline faces Yemen across the mouth of the Red Sea. The US had already maintained a base there, tied to its post-9/11 operations.

Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar Guelleh said at the time that many countries with bases in the country were focused on “protecting their commercial and investment interests”, in a 2024 interview with the Saudi-owned news outlet Asharq Al-Awsat.

Incidents fell from 237 in 2011 to almost none within five years. 

In addition to the naval task force, Benoit Lefevre, a French naval intelligence officer, argued that better-guarded ships made it “too risky, too uncertain to stay reliably profitable” for pirates.

The shipping industry was confident enough in that fix after a sustained lull that it formally lifted its “high risk” designation for the Indian Ocean only in 2023.

Since April this year, however, the French navy’s Mica Centre, which monitors the region, has recorded 18 piracy incidents and had three vessels still held for ransom, even before the MT Asana was added to the count.

A new opening at sea

The trigger was the war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran in February. Tehran began restricting passage through the Strait of Hormuz following US-Israeli strikes, later implementing a full blockade of the waterway, which carries 20% of the world’s oil and gas.

Whilst the fighting pulled naval and diplomatic attention to managing and resolving the conflict, merchant ships have been pushed closer to Somali waters, creating a target-rich environment.

Some incidents, however, have occurred far from Somalia, including the MT Asana hijacking near Yemen’s coast, with pirates increasingly relying on GPS and other technologies to track ships and monitor their movements.

“One thing that pirates, the Houthis, the IRGC and others have demonstrated is that chokepoints are highly vulnerable to small-scale attacks capable of crippling global supply chains,” Jatin Dua, a maritime security scholar and author of Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean, told The New Arab.

“What we’re seeing is low-tech and also ways for non-state actors as well as state actors to make chokepoints bend to their will,” Dua added. 

This diversion of focus is felt most acutely in Puntland, the semi-autonomous northern Somali region where most hijackers come from and where they bring their captured ships.

Jethro Norman, a Somalia specialist at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told The New Arab that the revival of hijackings off the Somali coast was being misread as an international maritime security problem, when it should instead be understood as part of the broader challenges facing Puntland.

Norman said three factors, beyond the international naval coalition, had helped suppress the hijackings at their source, though they had done little to address the underlying incentives driving the attacks: the region's coastal police force, the PMPF; local clan elders; and courts in the regional capital, Garowe. 

“All these things depend on Puntland’s state capacity,” he said, “and this is what has all fallen apart.” 

Since last year, Puntland has deployed a large share of its forces, including members of the PMPF, to a separate offensive against the Somali branch of Islamic State (IS) operating from the region’s mountains.

A rift with Somalia’s federal government has further strained Puntland’s resources, culminating this week in the forcible takeover of three bases in the region housing federal troops.

The economics of piracy

This has dovetailed with broader economic challenges within Somalia related to the Iran war.

Somalia imports around nine-tenths of what it consumes, and the disruption to Hormuz sent fuel and food prices sharply higher within days of the war’s start in February. Inflation has since persisted across the economy, with the Consumer Price Index rising 8.1% in June, according to the national statistics bureau.

Norman told The New Arab that the pirates were deliberately going after fuel tankers rather than selecting ships at random, because the same price rises squeezing Somali households have made fuel cargo unusually valuable. “It is not just opportunism,” he said.

A Puntland security official told the news agency AFP in April that those who seized the cargo ship Sward were mostly poor young men from the coastal town of Garacad, armed and angry over illegal fishing as much as drawn by ransom.

Puntland’s fisheries minister, Mohamed Abdulkadir Salah, said in June that illegal fishing was costing Somalia approximately $300 million a year, with roughly half of those losses occurring in Puntland.

A second official said the group all belonged to the same clan and sub-clan, which is different from that of Puntland’s president, making any crackdown a potentially destabilising move in a region where delicate clan balances need to be maintained.

“That’s why negotiations are best to defuse this kind of situation,” he told AFP. “But it also plays into the hands of the pirates.”

The surge has turned outside attention back toward the Somali coast, from Washington to Brussels to Cairo. Egypt's foreign ministry said in June it was working through its embassies in Mogadishu and Riyadh to secure the release of Egyptian sailors held aboard the tanker Eureka, seized off Somalia in May. 

In mid-July, the EU's foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, signed a new Status of Forces Agreement with Djibouti, renewing access for both Atalanta and a second EU mission, Aspides, which patrol the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.

While Saudi Arabia’s initiative to establish a Red Sea naval task force was likely prompted by Houthi attacks on its ships, a broader group of countries, including Somalia, has since joined the effort.

Abdel Aziz Aluwaisheg, the Gulf Cooperation Council’s assistant secretary-general for political affairs, called for “more support” for the Somali government to help it “contribute effectively to fighting piracy”. 

On 2 August, Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni signed an agreement in the port city of Bosaso with a US delegation led by Major General Claude Tudor of US Africa Command, expanding the US military presence there and pledging closer cooperation on maritime security in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

These measures, however, only address one element of the broader challenge, says Norman.

“Unless the international community directly resources the Puntland institutions that police this coastline,” he said, “neither the immediate threat nor the political economy sustaining it gets resolved.”

Faisal Ali is a freelance journalist covering Somalia and East Africa

Follow him on X: @FaisalAHAli

Edited by Charlie Hoyle