New Somali Piracy Situation is Insane

As if the 2020s couldn't get any crazier, something that most of the world probably assumed had been left behind in the early 2010s is suddenly beginning to happen again off the coast of Somalia. The Somali pirates have returned back onto the global stage once again. Throughout just a few months in 2026, armed pirate groups operating from the coast of Somalia were able to successfully capture four commercial merchant ships, putting the pace of Somali piracy-related hijackings on course to be the highest this year in more than a decade since 2012. As of the end of July, all four of these hijacked merchant ships still remain anchored closely together just off of the northern coast of Somalia with their 67 crew members all still being held hostage on board and with the pirates still demanding millions of dollars in ransom cash for their safe release. The first of these vessels, a Palo-flagged oil tanker called the Honor 25, was hijacked on the 21st of April by a group of Somali pirates approximately 30 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia. The ship had been traveling towards the Somali capital of Mogadishu with 18, 12,000 barrels of refined oil on board to try and relieve an acute fuel shortage that had developed there. Then just 5 days later on the 26th of April, another different group of Somali pirates managed to hijack a St. Kitts and Nevis-flag cargo ship called the Sward just off of the northern coast of Somalia as it was traveling towards Kenya with a full cargo of fertilizer. And then less than a week after that one, on the 2nd of May, more Somali pirates managed to pull off a very brazen hijacking of the Togo-flagged oil tanker Eureka while she was anchored just outside of the port of Kana in southern Yemen on the complete other side of the Gulf of Aden away from Somalia. Those three successful maritime hijackings by Somali pirates in only a matter of weeks rattled the global maritime industry. But for the next couple of months, a relative quiet set in that led some analysts to assume that they might have been isolated incidents. But then on the 17th of July, the pirates suddenly struck again when they seized another oil tanker, the Tanzania-flagged Asana, as it was sailing approximately 65 nautical miles southwest of Macala, Yemen, through the Gulf of Aden. In all four of these hijackings, none of the ships involved had any armed security on board, which made them easier targets. While all four of them were subsequently sailed by the pirates back towards the northern Somalia coastline where they have all remained anchored close together with their crews all held captive while ransom negotiations continue. And even more concerningly, the pirates have begun demonstrating that they still remember all of the same tricks that had made them so successful the last time Somali piracy exploded onto the world stage around 15 years ago. After they captured the large 330-foot-long Sward cargo ship in April, they began using it as a pirate mother ship, sailing it up and down the coast of Somalia and launching smaller speedboats from it to go out and capture other vessels nearby. In July, two smaller Iranian fishing boats were also seized by these pirate speedboats that were operating from the Sward in a highly coordinated attack. And at one point, at least six hijacked vessels were simultaneously being held off of the Somali coast. When one of the suspected pirate leaders who was involved in the Sward hijacking was arrested by local Somali authorities and brought to a police station, armed militia men actually attacked that police station the following day in an attempt to free him, which triggered a gunfight that killed one policeman and injured another. And all of this is beginning to look disturbingly familiar because only about 15 years ago, Somali piracy was regarded as the single greatest scourge to the international shipping industry anywhere on the planet. Between 2005 and 2012, Somali pirates exploded onto the global consciousness. They launched more than a thousand attacks against foreign ships during this period, successfully hijacked 218 of them, and took more than 3,700 foreign sailors as hostages. At the absolute peak of the Somali piracy crisis in 2011, there were more than 230 pirate attacks in just that single year. Upwards of 700 sailors were being held hostage simultaneously, while the total cost imposed upon the global economy by piracy around Somalia reached somewhere around $7 billion a year. A hidden tax on global commerce that was raising the price of goods all around the world. Big, super successful Hollywood blockbuster movies like Captain Phillips were coming out at the time about the crisis. While Somali piracy became so deeply ingrained in the cultural psyche of the United States that to many Americans even today, the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear Somalia is unfortunately pirate. But then almost as suddenly as Somali piracy had appeared, it seemed to disappear. There were 237 reported Somali piracy attacks in 2011. But by the time 2012 rolled around, that number had declined to only 75, which crashed even further to only 15 across all of 2013 and then only 11 in 2014. There were zero successful merchant ship hijackings at all between 2013 and 2016. Just one successful hijacking in 2017 and then none whatsoever at all between 2018 and 2022. For nearly a decade between 2013 and 2022, that sole successful hijacking in 2017 was the only one that Somali pirates managed to pull off, which most analysts wrote off as a one-off isolated incident. By the start of 2023, the scourge of Somali piracy appeared to have been so thoroughly defeated that the International Maritime Bureau formally removed the Western Indian Ocean's designation as a high-risk area for piracy. But then only months after they did so in December of 2023 came the hijacking of the MV Ruined by Somali pirates. The first successful hijacking of a merchant ship by them in more than 6 years. Followed by another successful hijacking in 2024, another round of relative calm in 2025. And now four more successful hijackings just through the end of July in 2026. A rate of piracy that is still well below the levels they were at back in 2011, but which still nonetheless shows a clear trend. For the first time since the peak of the Somali piracy crisis back in 2011, the rate of Somali piracy is increasing yet again. So, how did a bunch of ragtag pirates operating from one of the most impoverished and least developed countries on the planet manage to become one of the most significant threats to global shipping in the first place? How did an unprecedented international coalition of countries as geopolitically diverse as the US, EU, Russia, China, and India manage to nearly eliminate them? And perhaps most importantly now, why are the Somali pirates suddenly starting to come back again? To understand all of this, we need to go back about 35 years ago, back to the complete collapse of Somalia itself and the start of Somalia's status as the world's most infamous failed state. After years of brutal internal civil war, in January of 1991, the two-decade-long communist dictatorship of Siad Barre finally collapsed in Somalia. And with it went almost the entire Somali state as well. Government institutions throughout most of the country simply ceased functioning almost overnight. The Somali military disintegrated and the country shattered apart between various rival clans, warlords, militias, and eventually Islamist insurgencies. And this societal collapse created a particularly unusual problem for Somalia because of the country's geography. Somalia possesses more than 3,300 km of coastline stretching along the Gulf of Aden in the Indian Ocean. The longest coastline of any country in mainland Africa. And when the government collapsed in early 1991, the entire Somali

again. Throughout just a few months in 2026, armed pirate groups operating from the coast of Somalia were able to successfully capture four commercial merchant ships, putting the pace of Somali piracy related hijackings on course to be the highest this year in

more than a decade since 2012. As of the end of July, all four of these hijacked merchant ships still remain anchored closely together just off of the northern coast of Somalia with their 67 crew members all still being held

hostage on board and with the pirates still demanding millions of dollars in ransom cash for their safe [music] release. The first of these vessels, a Palo flagged oil tanker called the Honor 25, was hijacked on the 21st of April by

a group of Somali pirates approximately 30 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia. The ship had been traveling towards the Somali capital of Mogadishu with [music] 18 12,000 barrels refined oil on board to try and relieve an acute

fuel shortage that had developed there. Then just 5 days later on the 26th of April, another different group of Somali pirates managed to hijack a St. Kits and NeAs flag cargo ship called the Sward just off of the northern coast of

Somalia as it was traveling towards Kenya with a full cargo of fertilizer. And then less than a week after that one, on the 2nd of May, more Somali pirates managed to pull off a very brazen hijacking of the Togo flagged oil

tanker Eureka while she was anchored just outside of the port of Kana in southern Yemen on the complete other side of the Gulf of Aiden away from Somalia. Those three successful maritime hijackings by Somali pirates in only a

matter of weeks rattled the global maritime industry. But for the next couple of months, [music] a relative quiet set in that led some analysts to assume that they might have been isolated incidents. But then on the 17th of July, the pirates suddenly struck

again when they seized another oil tanker, the Tanzania flagged Asana, as it was sailing approximately 65 nautical miles southwest of Macala, Yemen, through the Gulf of Aiden. In all four of these hijackings, none of the ships involved had any armed security on

board, which made them easier targets. while all four of them were subsequently sailed by the pirates back towards the northern Somalia coastline where they have all remained anchored close together with their crews all held captive while ransom negotiations

continue. And even more concerningly, the pirates have begun demonstrating that they still remember all of the same tricks that had made them so successful the last time Somali piracy exploded onto the world stage around 15 years ago. After they captured the large 330

foot long sward cargo ship in April, they began using it as a pirate mother ship, sailing it up and down the coast of Somalia and launching smaller speedboats from it to go out and capture other vessels nearby. In July, two

smaller Iranian fishing boats were also seized by these pirate speedboats that were operating from the sward in a highly coordinated attack. And at one point at least six hijacked vessels were simultaneously being held off of the Somali coast. When one of the suspected

pirate leaders who was involved in the swar hijacking was arrested by local Somali authorities and brought to [music] a police station, armed militia men actually attacked that police station the following day in an attempt to free him, which triggered a gunfight

that killed one policeman and injured another. [music] And all of this is beginning to look disturbingly familiar because only about 15 years ago, [music] Somali piracy was regarded as the single greatest scourge to the international shipping industry anywhere on the

planet. Between 2005 and 2012, Somali pirates exploded onto the global consciousness. They launched more than a thousand attacks against foreign ships during this period, successfully hijacked 218 of them, and took more than 3,700 foreign sailors as hostages. At

the absolute peak of the Somali piracy crisis in 2011, there were more than 230 pirate attacks in just that single year.

Upwards of 700 sailors were being held hostage simultaneously, while the total cost imposed upon the global economy by piracy around Somalia reached somewhere around $7 billion a year. A hidden tax on global commerce that was raising the price of goods all around the world. Big

super successful Hollywood blockbuster movies like Captain Phillips were coming out at the time about the crisis.

[music] While Somali piracy became so deeply ingrained in the cultural psyche of the United States that to many Americans even today, the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear Somalia is unfortunately pirate. But then almost as suddenly as Somali piracy

had appeared, it seemed to disappear. There were 237 reported Somali piracy attacks in 2011. But by the time 2012 rolled around, that number had declined to only 75, which crashed even further to only 15 across all of 2013 and then

only 11 in 2014. [music] There were zero successful merchant ship hijackings at all between 2013 and 2016. [music] Just one successful hijacking in 2017 and then none whatsoever at all between 2018 and 2022.

For nearly a decade between 2013 and 2022, that sole successful hijacking in 2017 was the only one that Somali pirates managed to pull off, which most analysts wrote off as a one-off isolated incident. By the start of 2023, the

scourge of Somali piracy appeared to have been so thoroughly defeated that the International Maritime Bureau formally removed the Western Indian Ocean's designation as a high-risk area for piracy. But then only months after they did so in December of 2023 came the

hijacking of the MV ruined by Somali pirates. The first successful hijacking of a merchant ship by them in more than 6 years. [music] Followed by another successful hijacking in 2024, another round of relative calm in 2025. And now four more successful

hijackings just [music] through the end of July in 2026. a rate of piracy that is still well below the levels they were at back in 2011, but which still nonetheless shows a clear trend. For the first time since

the peak of the Somali piracy crisis back in 2011, the rate of Somali piracy is increasing yet again. So, how did a bunch of ragtag pirates operating from one of the most impoverished and least developed countries on the planet

managed to become one of the most significant threats to global shipping in the first place? How did an unprecedented international coalition of countries as geopolitically diverse as the US, EU, Russia, China, and India manage to nearly eliminate them? And

perhaps most importantly now, why are the Somali pirates suddenly starting to come back again? To understand all of this, we need to go back about 35 years ago, back to the complete collapse of Somalia itself and the start of

Somalia's status as the world's most infamous [music] failed state. After years of brutal internal civil war in January of 1991, the two decadel long communist dictatorship of Sad Bareet finally collapsed in Somalia. And with it went almost the entire Somali state

as well. Government institutions throughout most of the country simply [music] ceased functioning almost overnight. The Somali military disintegrated and the country shattered apart between various rival clans, warlords, militias, and eventually Islamist insurgencies. And this societal collapse created a particularly unusual

problem for Somalia because of the country's geography. Somalia possesses more than 3,300 km of coastline stretching along the Gulf of Aiden in the Indian Ocean. The longest coastline of any country in mainland Africa. And when the government collapsed in early

1991, the entire Somali Navy and Coast Guard effectively disappeared right along with it. one of the longest and most strategically important coastlines anywhere in the world was suddenly left with virtually nobody around to actually police it. [music] This coastline also

happens to sit immediately beside one of the busiest maritime highways on the planet. Ships traveling between Europe and Asia through the Suez Canal have to pass through the narrow Babelman dev straight between the Gulf of Aiden and the Red [music] Sea immediately to the

north of Somalia. Roughly 10 to 15% of all the world's seaborn [music] trade usually passes through this general area as a result. Meaning that thousands of enormous cargo ships, container ships, bulk carriers, and oil tankers were constantly [music] sailing past a

country that by the 1990s effectively possessed no government, no navy, no coast guard, no functioning court system, nor any police force capable of stopping anybody from attacking them.

But before pirates from Somalia began seriously attacking and raiding these merchant ships, [music] the initial targets they chose were usually smaller foreign fishing vessels. The waters offshore of Somalia contain extremely valuable and productive stocks of tuna and other fish. And [snorts] once there

was no longer any Somali government capable of enforcing the country's maritime borders, foreign fishing vessels from all across the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere began increasingly taking advantage of the situation by moving in to take whatever they could

without any oversight. Estimates for precisely how much illegal fishing took place in Somali waters throughout the 1990s and 2000s vary significantly, and some of the larger claims are difficult to independently verify. But there is still very little doubt that rampant

illegal and unregulated foreign fishing became a major grievance among Somalia's coastal communities during this era where many local Somali fishermen came to believe that enormous industrial trwers from the other side of the world were stealing their fish, out competing

them, ripping up the ocean floor, destroying their livelihoods, and leaving them behind with increasingly little left to catch themselves. For a country with little other legitimate economic opportunities beyond fishing, this was all completely catastrophic.

And at roughly [music] the same time, allegations also began swirling throughout Somalia that foreign companies and criminal organizations were taking advantage of the absence of a government by illegally dumping hazardous waste in Somalia's waters, too. Claims have ranged from ordinary

industrial and medical waste all the way up to radioactive material. And the evidence supporting the full scale of these allegations remains mixed and disputed. But then in 2004, a massive earthquake on the other side of the Indian Ocean triggered the deadliest

tsunami in human history that swept across the entire region. The coastline of Somalia was not spared from the tsunami's fury and nearly 300 people in Somalia were killed and 50,000 more were displaced after it impacted. But the tsunami also caused containers full of

hazardous materials to begin washing ashore in Somalia, too, lending some credibility to at least some of the allegations of illegal offshore dumping by foreigners in the 1990s.

Regardless of precisely how extensive the dumping actually was, the important point for understanding what came next is that many Somali genuinely believed that foreign countries were taking advantage of them by simultaneously stealing most of the fish out of their

waters and then dumping poisonous waste back into them in return. And so during the 1990s and the early 2000s, groups of armed Somali fishermen began taking matters into their own [music] hands.

Some of these groups that began forming started referring to themselves as volunteer coast guards that began approaching foreign fishing vessels in Somalia's waters, boarding them, and demanding payments for supposed fishing licenses, fines, or compensation for operating illegally inside of Somali

waters. In some cases, the fishermen involved may have genuinely viewed themselves as vigilantes defending their country's resources in the absence of any actual government capable of doing it instead. In other cases though, the supposed fines they were enforcing were

obviously little more than thinly veiled armed extortion. Throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s, this was basically how Somali piracy functioned, and it was small scale enough to effectively just blend into the background noise of global affairs. Piracy around Somalia

was not yet high enough to set it apart from other global piracy hotspots like the Gulf of Guinea or the Straight of Mala. But eventually the distinction between Somali vigilante and Somali pirate stopped mattering entirely because the fishermen who were getting

themselves involved in a piracy began realizing something extremely important. There was dramatically more money to be made from capturing one of those enormous [music] and usually undefended commercial ships sailing past Somalia through the Gulf of Aiden than there was ever going to be

from fishing or from extorting smaller foreign fishing vessels. Just one captured merchant ship could potentially earn more money through a ransom payment than an entire Somali fishing [music] village could make across multiple years.

And once that realization became widespread during the early 2000s, Somali piracy rapidly began evolving away from anything that could plausibly be described as vigilante coastg guard activity and into [music] an increasingly sophisticated organized criminal industry instead. And it really

did start becoming an industry. By the mid to late 2000s, a successful Somali pirate expedition could involve dozens or even hundreds of people on land and at sea, fulfilling highly specialized roles. Investors would provide the money up front to purchase boats, engines,

weapons, fuel, food, GPS systems, and satellite phones. Recruiters would go out and find young men willing to actually go out to sea and conduct the attacks. Experienced operational leaders would organize the expeditions and decide where to go and search for

targets. Armed gunmen would board and seize the ships, while other men would subsequently guard the captured sailors on land for months at a time.

Translators and negotiators who could speak English or other languages would communicate with the ship owners, insurance companies, governments, and families to negotiate the ransom payment, while clan elders and local political elites would provide protection on shore. And once the ransom

money eventually arrived, still more people were needed to move it around, distribute everybody's shares, pay bribes, and launder the proceeds. In effect, many pirate expeditions began functioning almost like extremely violent startup companies in Silicon Valley. Somebody with money could invest

in a pirate expedition by paying for a portion of the equipment and operating costs. And if that expedition successfully captured a ship and collected a ransom, that investor would receive an agreed upon percentage of the profits in return. The actual pirates

who went out to sea were essentially the high-risk employees who might return home with tens of thousands of dollars if everything worked out, but might also return back with nothing, get arrested by a foreign navy, or simply die out at

sea if it didn't work out. The potential rewards, however, were almost unimaginably large by Somali standards.

An individual pirate involved in a successful operation from start to finish might end up walking away with somewhere between $10,000 and $75,000 at the end of it. In a country where the average annual income was only around $700.

In other words, a young Somali man turned pirate could potentially earn an entire lifetimes worth of ordinary income through just a single successful hijacking. No wonder then that so many of them started doing it. And after successfully collecting a ransom once,

the pirates could reinvest that money into buying heavier weapons, bigger [music] ships, more supplies, and more gunmen to launch even more ambitious raids for even bigger ransoms before doing it all over again in a violent cycle that continued snowballing

throughout the 2000s. Warlords in Somalia eventually began noticing the economic opportunity that was available in piracy and began putting up their own resources into funding operations to get a return. And the enormous amounts of money that began flowing into piracy

inevitably transformed some of the small coastal communities where the pirates were operating from. Coastal towns in Somalia like Ae, Oio, and Hared here transformed into the most famous pirate strongholds where captured vessels could be anchored offshore for months at a

time. While negotiations continued, pirate money flowed through the local economies and a restaurants, hotels, vehicles housing supplies and virtually everything else that was required to keep dozens of captured ships and hundreds of hostages all functioning. The pirate groups couldn't

operate in isolation from these communities. They needed huge amounts of support on land, which meant that ransom money had to be spread around enough to make continued piracy locally worthwhile. But before any of that money could actually be made, the pirates

still had to somehow capture one of those huge merchant ships at sea in the first place. And by the late 2000s, they had gotten disturbingly good at it. A typical attack often began aboard a larger, previously captured fishing

vessel or traditional DAO that the pirates used as a mother ship. the small speedboats that the pirates actually used for their attacks at extremely limited ranges by themselves. But a larger mother ship could carry the pirates their fuel, food, weapons, and

several smaller skiffs hundreds of kilometers deep out into the [music] Indian Ocean. Once the mother ship located a vulnerable merchant vessel, two or three skiffs carrying around six to 10 armed pirates each could be launched into the water and accelerated

towards the target ship at a much faster speed than it was capable of escaping away at. As the skiffs closed the distance, the pirates would begin firing assault rifles and sometimes even RPGs towards the ship, but almost always more

for intimidation rather than actually trying to sink or disable the ship. If they destroyed the ship, after all, they wouldn't be able to collect their ransom. Once they got alongside, the pirates would throw up grappling hooks or raise lightweight ladders against the

hole and climb themselves on board. Merchant crews at the time in the 2000s were generally unarmed. And once even a handful of armed pirates reached the ship's bridge and seized control [music] over the captain and officers, the ship

was usually theirs. The pirates would then order the crew to sail their own vessel back towards Somalia where it could be anchored offshore beside one of the piratec controlled coastal towns and the long ransom negotiation process could begin. It was around 2005 when the

introduction of mother ships completely transformed the geographic scale of the problem. Somali pirates were no longer limited just to attacking ships passing immediately beside their coastline.

After 2005, with mother ships, they could remain out at sea for weeks at a time and operate hundreds or even more than a thousand kilometers away from Somalia, covering a gigantic area stretching from the Gulf of Aiden deep

into the western Indian Ocean. At the same time, increasingly cheap and available civilian technologies like GPS receivers, satellite phones, weather forecasts, and ship tracking information made it far easier for relatively small groups of pirates operating from fishing boats to navigate across enormous

distances and coordinate attacks on some of the largest commercial vessels on Earth. These two separate graphs show the number of reported piracy incidents and hotspots from around the world on the left and the number of reported piracy hijackings in those same hotspots

around the world on the right. Between about 2000 and 2006, the numbers of piracy incidents and hijackings around Somalia were not substantially different than in other regions of the world like West Africa and Indonesia. But after the Somali pirates began using mother ships

around 2005 and after Somali warlords began realizing just how much money there was on the table and began investing in a piracy. You can clearly see the absolute explosion in Somali piracy between about 2006 and 2011.

Somali pirates launched 111 attacks against commercial ships in 2008. another 218 attacks in 2009, 219 attacks in 2010, [music] and an all-time high of 237 attacks in 2011. By 2010 and 2011, at the peak of the crisis, roughly half of all piracy

incidents in the world were taking place in the waters around Somalia. And in 2010 alone, Somali pirates managed to successfully hijack around 50 commercial vessels. And there were as many as 700 sailors being held hostage in Somalia simultaneously.

In 2011, when the number of attacks was the highest, more than 1,200 sailors were taken hostage by Somali pirates and 35 of them died while they were in captivity. And some of the ships they managed to capture during this period

were absolutely enormous. In November of 2008, [music] Somali pirates managed to capture the Syria star, a Saudi super tanker that was carrying roughly $100 million worth of the crude oil on board.

At more than 300 m long, the Sirius Star was one of the largest ships ever seized by pirates in history. [music] And its capture demonstrated that virtually no civilian ship in the region could simply assume that it was too large or too

valuable to become a target. Then only a few months after that, in April of 2009, Somali pirates attacked the American container ship Maris, Alabama, about 240 nautical miles off of the coast of Somalia. An incident that became one of

the most famous pirate attacks of the entire crisis. It was notably the first time that pirates had managed [music] to successfully capture a ship registered under the US flag since the 19th century, which brought the crisis into the greater consciousness of the

American public. The crew managed to regain control over their ship, but the pirates escaped into a lifeboat with the American captain, Richard Phillips, as their hostage. The following standoff lasted for several days until US Navy Seal snipers aboard the USS Banebridge

managed to kill three of the pirates and rescued Phillips alive. All of which was later adapted into the blockbuster Hollywood movie Captain Phillips a few years later in 2013.

But most of the hijackings didn't end with military rescues like that. Usually, they ended months later with huge piles of money. Once a captured vessel was anchored off the Somalia's coast, negotiators representing the pirates and the ship owner could spend

months and sometimes even more than a year arguing over the ransom price while the crew remained trapped aboard. The pirates had a powerful incentive to keep all of their hostages alive because dead sailors were ultimately worthless to them. But that didn't mean that the

conditions of captivity were remotely comfortable for the sailors. Hostages could endure extreme heat, poor sanitation, inadequate food and water, disease, threats, beatings, and [music] constant psychological pressure all throughout their captivity, which on average throughout the crisis lasted somewhere between 4 and 8 months. While

some particularly unfortunate sailors remained prisoners for more than 3 years. And over time, the ransoms being demanded and earned by the pirates kept getting bigger and bigger. In the earlier years, around 2005, a ransom might come in at below $200,000.

But by 2008, demands in the range of 1 to2 million had become more common. And by 2010 and 2011, 3 to5 million ransoms were becoming increasingly normal, with exceptional cases even reaching beyond $10 million.

In 2011, at the height of the crisis, more than $150 million in ransoms were collectively paid out to Somali pirates.

That year alone, big money was being made. And once a final deal was agreed upon, the ransom money would most often be literally loaded up into waterproof containers aboard a chartered aircraft and then parachuted directly onto the deck of the captured vessel where the

pirates would then count up the cash and confirm its authenticity before finally abandoning the ship and allowing the crew to sail it safely away if everything checked out. But despite these massive ransom payments, the pirates themselves were actually

capturing only a tiny fraction of the total amount of money that their activities were costing the global economy. At the peak of the crisis around 2010 and 2011, Somali pirates were probably collecting somewhere around 100 to $200 million per year in

ransom revenue. While the total worldwide economic cost of Somali piracy had soared to around 6 or7 billion dollar annually, most of which was due to dramatically higher insurance premiums for ships operating in the western Indian Ocean, security teams,

naval deployments, legal expenses, shipping delays, additional fuel and wages, and ships being forced to take longer detours to avoid the most dangerous waters. Eventually, the cost became so high that much of the world began treating Somali piracy almost like

it was a miniature war. Starting in the late 2000s, an [music] extraordinary coalition of countries began deploying their warships into the waters around Somalia to combat the piracy problem that seems almost unthinkable today. The US and its allies organized combined

task force [music] 151. The EU launched Operation Adalanta in December of 2008, which is still technically ongoing to this day, while NATO established Operation Ocean Shield in 2009. And beyond the traditional Western alliances, countries as diverse as Russia, China, India, Japan, and

South Korea all deployed their own naval assets into the region as well. At the peak, roughly 25 to 30 warships from all around the world could be operating around Somalia simultaneously, representing one of the strangest examples of international military

cooperation in the modern era, where geopolitical rivals who disagreed about almost everything else could at least agree at the time that pirates hijacking their merchant shipping was bad for all of them. But the warships alone weren't what defeated the pirates. The merchant

ships themselves [music] also started making themselves significantly harder to capture. Shipping companies began adopting a wide range of what became known as best management [music] practices or BMP for transiting through pirateinfested waters. Crews installed razor wire around vulnerable boarding

points. Used high pressure fire hoses and water cannons to keep approaching skiffs away. Traveled at higher speeds whenever it was possible. Conducted evasive maneuvers during attacks. and constructed fortified panic rooms on board their ships known as citadels where the entire crew could retreat to

lock themselves inside, disable the ship, and then wait for a nearby warship to arrive. Surveillance aircraft, satellites, and improved intelligence sharing also made pirate mother ships easier to identify and track before they could launch their attacks. But probably

the single biggest development of all was simply just putting armed security guards on board the merchant ships.

[music] Privately contracted security teams carrying rifles began becoming increasingly common aboard vessels traveling through the region around Somalia. And they presented the pirates with a very simple problem. The pirates entire business model basically depended upon overwhelming unarmed civilian

sailors through intimidation alone. It didn't work nearly as well when the people on board the ship were actually capable of shooting back. Publicly reported data from the height of the crisis indicates that not a single merchant ship carrying an armed private

security team was ever successfully hijacked after the practice became widespread. The economics of piracy therefore began collapsing. Attacks were becoming dramatically more likely to fail while the chances of pirates getting killed, arrested, or intercepted by a warship were also increasing. The cost of

organizing pirate expeditions remained high, but the likelihood of ever collecting a ransom at the end was falling. And since piracy had always been primarily a business above anything else, once it stopped being a particularly good business to be

involved in, people just stopped investing in it. The collapse in Somali piracy happened with incredible speed.

After the all-time high record of 237 Somali piracy attacks in 2011, the number collapsed to just 75 attacks the next year in 2012 and then just 15 attacks in 2013 and only 11 in 2014. For a whole decade between 2013 and late

2023, there was only one single successful hijacking of a merchant vessel that was made by Somali pirates, which was an oil tanker called the Aerys 13 that was hijacked in March of 2017.

And it also ended in disaster for all of the pirates involved after they found out that the Aerys 13 had been hired by a prominent Somali businessman and after they subsequently found themselves in a gunfight with local Somali authorities

over the ship's fate. They ended up releasing the ship and its crew without collecting any ransom just [music] 3 days after they had hijacked it. And that was about it for Somali piracy for roughly a decade. Somali piracy began

falling into the rear view mirror of global issues as greater crises elsewhere in Ukraine in the Middle East began capturing [music] the headlines instead. But the important thing to understand about the decline of Somali piracy across the 2010s and the early

2020s is that Somalia itself didn't suddenly become a wealthy, peaceful, and stable country. Many of the conditions that had originally created piracy in Somalia were still present. The country remained deeply impoverished with little economic opportunities. The federal government still remained weak with

insurgent groups like Al-Shabaab still controlling swaths of the country and with secessionist and autonomydriven factions effectively controlling their own deacto independent states in both the Somali land and hutland regions of the country as well. Illegal fishing and dumping both remain grievances in

coastal communities. Armed groups and clan networks remained influential and powerful. And many of the actual pirates financiers negotiators and local networks that had participated in piracy's golden age were never arrested or dismantled [music] and had effectively just gone dormant. They

simply stopped pirating because it had become too difficult and too dangerous to make enough reliable money from it.

Not because they were ever physically eliminated. Many of them just returned back to fishing again. Others moved on to smuggling or joined with insurgencies.

Some simply went home. But the knowledge never disappeared. People still remembered which communities could support hijacked vessels, [music] how to recruit crews, how to seize fishing boats for use as mother ships, how to identify vulnerable merchant vessels, how to negotiate with foreign ship

owners, and how to distribute millions of dollars of ransom money through local clan and business networks. [music] And beginning near the end of 2023, after nearly a decade of dormcancy, some of those networks started waking back up again as geopolitical circumstances

shifted. In October of 2023, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, [music] triggering Israel's subsequent invasion of Gaza and the road to war all across the entire Middle East. Weeks later, the Houthies in Yemen began attacking merchant

shipping connected to Israel and the United States in the Red Sea, which triggered the formation of an international naval coalition to safeguard merchant travel through the Red Sea against their attacks. The spectre of Somali piracy was broadly considered to be a thing of the past by

this point, and so many of the international warships and naval assets that have been dedicated to suppressing them were transferred into action against the Houthies instead. And with that, some of the old dormant Somali pirate networks began sensing a new

opportunity to strike again. In December of 2023, just a couple of months after the Houthies first began firing missiles at commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the world's navies reallocated their resources to stop [music] them, Somali pirates managed to capture the MD Ruin,

a Maltese flagged bulk cargo ship as it was sailing off the coast of Somalia.

[music] It marked the first time that Somali pirates had managed to successfully hijack a merchant ship in more than 6 years since the Aerys 13 back in 2017. And unlike the ARS 13, they would hold on to it for a lot

longer than just 3 days. They took the MB Ruin and its whole crew of 17 men back to the Somali coast where they spent time converting it into a mother ship to go out and capture even more ships. Three months later, in March of

2024, the pirates sailed the MB ruin back out of sea again in this mother ship role, hunting for more ships before they were intercepted by two warships from the Indian Navy. A 40-hour standoff ensued before the pirates finally

surrendered the ship without collecting a ransom. But the incident was clearly something of an obit, showing that Somali pirate networks were reactivating again in light of the perceived vulnerability of foreign warships diverting away from Somalia to combat the Houthies. And sure enough, many more

attacks would follow it. Across 2024, eight attacks were recorded by Somali pirates, the highest number in a single year since [music] 2017. Most of them were either unsuccessful or only resulted in the capture of minor fishing vessels. But one of them was an

undisputed triumph for the pirates. In March of 2024, Somali pirates managed to hijack the MV Abdullah, a Bangladesh flag bulk carrier, as it was sailing roughly 600 nautical miles off the coast of Somalia, transporting 55,000 tons of coal between Mosmbique and the United

Arab Emirates. The pirates then took the ship and its entire crew back to the Somali coast. and this time they were actually able to collect on a ransom.

Reuters interviewed the pirates afterward who claimed that they had received a $5 million ransom payment from the ship owner following 32 days of negotiations.

This was extremely notable because it was the first time in more than a decade that Somali pirates managed to successfully hijack a merchant ship and collect a ransom. The last time that this had happened was all the way back

in 2012 [music] when Somali pirates had captured the MV Smeirny and managed to collect a 9.5 million ransom for it 10 months later in 2013. [music] The few ships that Somali pirates have captured since then were always abandoned before they could

manage to collect on any ransom. And then suddenly the successful capture and $5 million ransom payment of the MV Abdullah in 2024 proved not only that Somali pirates could still capture a major merchant ship. It also proved that

the old piracy business model of hijacking a ship, anchoring it off Somalia, negotiating, and then collecting millions in ransom money was still viable even after all this time later. In a country that was still politically shattered with few available

economic opportunities, just like it was during the last time piracy had surged, that was like a green light turning on for the pirates to go out once again.

While 2025 was relatively quiet with no successful merchant vessel hijackings by the pirates, everything would begin accelerating rapidly again in 2026.

[music] Between the 21st of April and the 2nd of May alone, multiple pirate armed groups operating from Somalia carried out a dense cluster of attacks and hijackings of merchant vessels around the Somalian Yemeni coasts, including the seizures of

the Honor 25, the Sword, and the Eureka that we talked about at the start of this video. [music] After the later capture of the Asana in July, four hijacked merchant vessels are currently being anchored by the pirates off the

coast of Somalia with their entire crews being held for ransom. The first time that something to this scale has happened since the peak of the Somali piracy crisis back between 2010 and 2012. The current ransom being demanded by the pirates for the release of the

Eureka alone reportedly escalated from $3 million to $10 million. And as of this video's writing, there is still no resolution in sight. And there are several reasons for why all of this is beginning to happen again now. The

biggest factor is the power vacuum that's currently taking place around Somalia that is reexposing merchant shipping to their attacks again. The world's navies that once came together to stop Somali piracy in the 2010s have dramatically more problems competing for

their attention today in a global environment that is significantly less stable. NATO's European members are primarily focused on defending against Russia and the war raging across Ukraine in the Black Sea today. The United States committed naval assets to the Red

Sea to defend against Houthy attacks there. And then at the end of February this year, the US also launched a war against Iran that resulted in the closure of the straight of Hormuz and the reallocation of even more US naval

assets to try and deal with it. I don't believe that it's a coincidence at all that only around 7 weeks after the US launched its war against Iran, Somali pirates began launching their own rapid capture of merchant vessels again. The

EU has stated that its own Operation Atlanta assets dedicated to combating Somali piracy have not been reduced because of the Middle East crisis, but the broader international maritime security environment is nonetheless significantly more stretched than it was back during the original antipiriracy

campaign of the 2010s. Moreover, while Russia was a major contributor to the naval coalition against the Somali pirates back in the early 2010s, right alongside NATO and the EU, that cooperation is completely unthinkable again today. NATO and the EU

were both effectively engaged in a cold war with Russia over the Ukraine issue and relations between them are extremely hostile at the present. meaning that cooperation and intelligence sharing between them on a tertiary issue like Somali piracy is just not going to

happen again today. And at the same time, economic opportunity within Somalia is still extremely poor. And if anything, it's just been getting even worse than usual. Recently, illegal and unregulated foreign fishing in Somalia's waters is still estimated to be costing

Somalia an average of $300 million a year. and compounding the country's economic woes even further. The Trump administration has almost completely eliminated all of the US developmental programs to coastal Somali communities that had been providing them with an

economic alternative to piracy for decades. In 2024, during the final year of the Biden administration, the US provided Somalia with $476 million worth of development aid, which the Trump administration drastically reduced to just $70 million in 2025. And during the

first three months of 2026, they only sent $3 million to Somalia. At the same time, rapidly rising food, fuel, and fertilizer costs caused by the Iran war and the shutdown of the Straight of Hormuz have only further piled onto

Somalia's current economic misery. No doubt pushing more men than usual to consider resorting to piracy again. and especially when they know that one group of pirates managed to score a $5 million ransom pretty recently in 2024. The spike in oil prices has also meant that

Somali pirates are now incentivized to target oil tankers because they know that they can likely ransom them for a higher profit. That's why it's also not a coincidence that out of the four merchant vessels that have been hijacked

by Somali pirates so far in 2026, three of them have been oil tankers. The rising shipping, insurance, and fuel costs, all resulting from the Iran war and the Houthies bombarding the Red Sea also means that some shipping companies

are beginning to cut corners on their security in order to save money, reducing their numbers of armed security that they place on board their ships, which is exposing them more to piracy attacks. And this time, the pirates appear to be receiving more help from

the outside as well. On at least two instances, at least according to US intelligence, Somali pirates are believed to have coordinated directly with Houthi officials to plan their attacks on commercial vessels. It appears now that the Houthies have

agreed to help arm, train, [music] and share intelligence with pirates from Somalia in the hope of further disrupting regional maritime commerce to their own benefit, which was something that was never happening back in the 2010s during the last Somali piracy

crisis. And Somalia itself is still a very fragile country whose government is still incapable of policing its own waters. The federal government in Somalia is vastly overstretched, combating the al-Shabaab and ISIS insurgencies that are still raging across the interior of the country.

They're dealing with the secessionist state of Somaliand that was recently officially recognized as an independent state by Israel. And they're also dealing with local officials in the Punkland region who have rejected the federal government's authority and have begun acting as another de facto

independent state within Somalia since [music] 2024. The Somali government still has virtually zero bandwidth available to stop pirates, especially with the almost complete cut to all US development aid and the recent rise in fuel, [music] food, and fertilizer prices. For all of

these reasons, [music] it now seems almost inevitable that the scourge of Somali piracy, once thought to have been solved for good back in the mid2010s, is once again on the rise and rearing its head in the western Indian Ocean. Now,

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