Somalia's Pirates are Back

I'm the Captain Now If that phrase is familiar to you've doubtlessly seen the movie Captain Phillips about the hijacking of the Maersk, Alabama by Somali pirates. That movie was set in 2009 and came out in 2013, and by then the issue already seemed a little old-fashioned.

Somali piracy was in decline, multiple Middle Eastern nations were collapsing into civil war, and frankly, it felt like the world had moved on.

Well, jump forward to 2026 and it turns out that this lull was just an epic timeout before their triumphant return. Somalia's pirates are back. Already this year, there have been at least 15 separate attacks, which puts us on pace for the worst year since 2013, with two more this month alone.

Except this time around, it's not just a group of guys looking to get rich, though that's obviously still a big part of the equation. So, just how did everyone's favorite non-Caribbean pirates end up back in business after all these years?

Way back when Although the hijacking of the Maersk, Alabama got the headlines, the tortured path that led Somalia to this point began many years earlier.

By 2009, Somalia had already spent nearly two decades without a centralized government after Syed Barre's dictatorship collapsed and had largely fractured into separate clan-run areas.

When you add deeply entrenched poverty, sky-high unemployment, a collapse of the fishing trade, and geographic proximity to one of the most important bodies of water for international shipping, you have just about every ingredient necessary for piracy to take root. the first groups even claimed that they were filling the gap left by the government. the

Collapse, foreign fishermen saw the chaos off Somalia's coastline as essentially open season.

They could head on over and fish to their heart's content without having to worry about limits, permitting, or any of that nonsense.

The Somalis who first started going around and collecting payments from these fishermen began identifying themselves as the Somali Coast Guard. While we're not entirely sure how many fully bought that one, it did prove to be a good business model.

It didn't take long for others to realize that business model could be used for more than just harassing other fishermen.

You could take the whole boat, crew included, hostage. late 2000s, this had blossomed into the piracy that we all remember from news reports and that episode of South Park. Somali and pirates meet! A serious naval threat that hijacked major vessels.

In 2008, they sieved the MV Finer, which was carrying 33 T-72 tanks, and then followed that up by taking a Saudi supertanker that had a very modest 2 million barrels of oil on board. In the years they were most active, roughly 2005 to 2012, the World Bank estimated that somewhere between $339 million and $413 million was ultimately paid out in ransom.

That is, serious money, even in Silicon Valley.

But Somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world. lot of these guys, even if they were just getting a tiny piece of the action, it was still more than they might hope to earn across a lifetime of honest work.

Incentive structures aside, it was around the time of the hijacking of the Alabama, that community decided that something had to be done about this. The US took a leading role, helping to organize a dedicated multinational anti-piracy force, while NATO, the EU, China, and India sent warships of their own to participate.

At the height of the campaign, there were as many as 30 warships patrolling the region at any given time. And the message was really clear: you guys have had your fun, the party is f***ing over. In addition to the coalition's presence, commercial ships also took things into their own hands.

After them began to hire armed security guards, which proved remarkably effective. Before, ships were usually unarmed, so when even a few warning shots started ringing out as pirates approached in their small skiffs, it was enough to make them retreat. This wasn't a naval-only battle.

Authorities in the de facto independent Somali region of Puntland started policing the problem onshore at the same time. The strategy worked damn well.

By the middle of the 2010s, Somali piracy had gone from an international crisis to the geopolitical equivalent of scrubs, something we were all unhealthily obsessed with for the first decade of the 21st century, but now don't really think about.

But just as 2026 saw JD and Turk return via the magic of millennial nostalgia, so too has this year seen Somalia's pirates read on their scrubs and pick up their guns. Sadly for the world, though, the result has been less wacky medical hijinks and more terrifying regional instability.

Back from the dead The first signs that Somalia's pirates might be considering a revival tour came back in 2023, when a group hijacked the MV ruin near Sokotra.

At the time, it raised a few eyebrows, but overall it wasn't a huge story. There was a war on in Ukraine on October 7th that just happened. The world had just other stuff to think about.

A few months later, though, a separate group took the MV Abdullah nearly 600 miles off the coast of Mogadishu. That latter group held the crew of the ship for over a month before walking away with a ransom of around $5 million.

Even then, though, the whole situation still felt a bit more like a trip down memory lane, a chance for older people scrolling the news to be all like, "Oh yeah, I remember those guys," rather than any sign that it might become a regular occurrence.

The numbers back this up: there were only eight piracy incidents in 2024, and that number fell to five in 2025. And then, ladies and gents, 2026 hit, and, well, what a year it has been.

At the time of recording, data from the AFP places the total number of pirate attacks in the waters around Somalia at 15, with six vessels being hijacked since April alone and two happening this month, which was what tipped us to put this video together.

For some context, that's the highest annual attack total since 2013, and it's only August, just about. Among those taken was the Lutuf, which the pirates seized while off the coast of Puntland. And it wasn't your typical cargo vessel, either.

It was reportedly carrying a significant number of Turkish weapons, communication equipment, and other military supplies inbound for Ankara's military outpost in Somalia. Imagine the pirates who happened to stumble on that treasure trove before they even started negotiations for ransom of the hostages. They were quite literally sitting on a mini arsenal.

Where exactly those weapons went is unclear, but in a country with no shortage of militias, insurgents, and Islamist terror groups, we're betting that someone finds a way to put them to use. And that very possibly could be in the hijacking of even more shipping. And around and around we go.

Somalia overall has been spiraling into a crisis in recent years. Even by Somali standards, the federal government has spent much of this year locked in an increasingly ugly constitutional battle over the question of the next elections, with opposition figures accusing current President Hassan Sheikh Mohammed of extending his own term.

By June, the dispute had moved well past political arguments and had escalated into gun battles in Mogadishu.

Those clashes ultimately killed at least 13 people and wounded some 200 more before the shooting died down. But the political crisis itself never really went away. The government and opposition remain in essentially a stalemate over this to this day, and the dispute is increasingly spilling over into armed confrontations elsewhere in the country.

That includes increasing attempts by the constituent parts of Somalia to break off and declare independence. While Somaliland has long acted as a de facto independent nation within internationally recognized Somali territory, others have attempted to join in recent years.

Juba Land attempted to break off in 2025, while South West State tried to suspend all relations with Mogadishu earlier this year before federal troops entered and pacified it.

And then there's Puntland, which has long handled its own affairs while stopping short of declaring independence, but which stopped recognizing the federal government in 2024 and today remains firmly outside all Somali government structures. And that's not even including all the terrorist issues.

All the while, the Al-Qaeda-linked group Al-Shabaab has continued to fight the government across the south, meaning the state security services were stretched way beyond what they could realistically deliver on.

Meanwhile, the North and Puntland region has seen increased Islamic State activity, leading to major military operations against the jihadists. In short, the country as a whole is in a bit of a mess. But it's Puntland that we now want to focus on, as it includes much of Somalia's northern coastline.

As a result, this place was basically synonymous with piracy at the peak during the first wave, and it's entering center stage once again. We currently can confirm that all six of the commercial ships that have been taken since April are still being held for ransom, and they appear to have found a very unhappy home off the coast of Puntland.

An international force could attempt a rescue operation, but that brings its own risks.

The pirates usually threaten to kill the hostages outright if anyone attempts a move, and at least so far, nobody's been willing to call their bluff.

Puntland's actually spent years building the institutions needed to shut all that down, most importantly taking the form of its maritime police force, which became one of the few local entities capable of going after pirate groups. In this, they're actually victims of their own success.

Piracy, like we said, was just being seen as yesterday. a story with groups like al-shabab being what everyone was focused on that same sort of logic appears to have taken hold with the international forces who have been tasked with securing the high seas who didn't intend to make a deployment a permanent feature nato finished its dedicated anti-piracy

Mission back in 2016 and after that withdrawal didn't yield a return to ships being seized some of the more expensive security practices that shipping companies have put in place also began to wind down by the start of 2023 the indian oceans formal high-risk area designation had been removed entirely and the armed guard business that had proven to be so

Effective at deterring pirates had fallen from hundreds of companies to just a few dozen and given the relative piece that followed the drawdown it looked pretty justified as time marched on the machinery that had been stationed here to stop piracy in the first place was allowed to shrink accordingly but as we've seen time and time again in recent years just

Because a threat has receded does not mean that you should let your security infrastructure wither just as europe allowed its military capabilities to decay when it seemed russia was no longer an issue so too did shipping companies and governments allow their anti-piracy measures to decay and right now we're seeing the results of that no easy way out piracy

Threat is back the obvious answer would be to simply rebuild the machinery right back up again after all it did work well the first time around so we can simply command c command v the game plan and call it a day right well the issue with that plan though is that the world in which it operated in no longer really exists for one thing the us navy is already

Stretched thin in the strait of hormuz the uss abraham lincoln just set a new record for how long it went without a port call let's just say that wasn't something anybody on board was celebrating beyond just the lincoln though numerous analysts have pointed out how stretched the navy is so even though washington wasn't sitting around with nothing going on

Back in 2009 it had a lot more wiggle room to commit forces but the us is only one part of this and it gets progressively grimmer from here like the piracy boom of the 2000s some of today's pirate groups appear to be developing unusual relationships with armed groups that have their own reasons to go at this way harder than the first time around back in late

2023 reporting out of somalia suggested that al-shabab had reached an agreement with at least some pirate groups to provide them protection in exchange for roughly 30 of ransom proceeds along with a share of whatever else they stole while subsequent data on that front has been pretty thin somali officials were still highlighting those links as very much a

Thing when the mv abdullah was released for around 5 million us dollars given just how insanely profitable hijacking ships for ransom payments is this might just seem like a quick cash grab by the insurgents but that's where things start to get really unorthodox because al-shabab has actually been building ties across the gulf of aden with the houthi rebels

In yemen the houthis are a zaidi shiite rebel group while al-shabab is a sunni organization that's more or less made its raison d'etre to oppress the Shia.

So yes, this is a pretty unusual partnership and inherently a transactional one. A UN sanctions monitoring report released last year claims that al-Shabaab representatives met with Houthi officials in 2024, hoping to get their hands on whatever weapons their unconventional Yemeni allies could spare.

According to the report, the Houthis were willing to share, on the condition that the group increase piracy and generally cause headaches for international shipping off the coast. This was, of course, meant to serve as cover for the Houthis' own goals. They've now starred in no fewer than half a dozen of our episodes.

Given the ongoing threat, they've posed to international shipping off their coast, and in particular, in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That's the narrow choke point off the coast of Yemen, where ships moving from the Red Sea to the open ocean have to pass through. Think of it as a mini Hormuz.

Ostensibly, the goal here was that if someone else was also causing a racket, their attacks on ships would be harder to single out and crack down on. And that's where we finally have to bring this back to what's been going on with Iran.

There's been no shortage of commentary suggesting that the war has kicked off the recent surge of piracy, and there's good evidence to back up those claims.

Erickson of Obsidian Risk Advisors has argued that the pirates currently face a far lower risk of American reaction because Washington is simply so bogged down fighting Tehran.

And while the current traffic jam in Hormuz is usually regarded as something ranging from a major headache to an outright international crisis, that interpretation very much depends on what side of the equation you're on. For the Houthis, Al-Shabaab, and any aspiring pirates in Somalia, Iran is basically living out their wildest dreams.

They now have direct evidence that sea access and a willingness to attack ships near a crucial choke point is all that's needed to extort some of the most powerful governments in the world.

But blaming this entirely on the Iran war also requires that we ignore a lot of other evidence. we showed earlier, this trend really dates back, at least in part, a couple of years.

And while the headlines of the US being bogged down in Hormuz can give the impression that it's go-time for piracy elsewhere in the world, they weren't the only ones operating out here.

NATO may have wrapped up their mission, but the European Union actually did not. They continued their anti-piracy naval mission, named Atalanta. And they're not the only ones either.

A separate multinational force has kept ships operating in the region throughout all of this. The difference is that none of this comes anywhere near the scale of the original version, and doing that again might honestly just not be on the cards. with Washington spearheading the effort anyway. That ultimately may be what the pirates are betting on.

They don't need the international community to disappear entirely. They just need the ringleader to be sufficiently overwhelmed. given that the Houthis have enacted a blockade on Saudi Arabia, and are reportedly considering implementing their own tolls in the Bab al-Mandeb, they very well might be right.

After all, between the chaos in Hormuz and the troubles with the Houthis, who's going to have the bandwidth to deal with a few Somali pirates?

Thank you for watching.