Piracy off Somalia has returned. An AFP analysis of International Maritime Organization data found at least fifteen attacks since the start of the year, eight of them in the Gulf of Aden since May. Other maritime security assessments put the count higher — at least seventeen incidents across Somali waters and the Gulf of Aden since January, including three successful hijackings of commercial vessels and five of dhows.

This is the most significant resurgence in more than a decade, and it is not yet at the scale of the 2011 peak.

The naval explanation

The most straightforward account of why this is happening now is about where the warships went.

Since 2023, naval and surveillance assets in the region have shifted toward the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb in response to Houthi attacks on shipping, reducing counter-piracy coverage off Somalia. This year’s disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, following the war that began on 28 February, has stretched the same finite set of hulls further still.

Somali piracy was never eliminated. It was suppressed, by a sustained naval presence, armed guards aboard ships and industry security practice. Remove one leg of that and the underlying conditions — an unpoliced coastline, established local networks, and vessels worth millions passing within reach — are unchanged from 2011.

What the attacks look like

The largest attack of the year came on 21 April, when around thirty pirates armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers targeted the oil tanker Honour 25 north of Eyl — a former fishing town in Puntland that has become a major hub of the trade.

The method is the one the region developed a decade ago: seize a dhow, use it as a mother vessel to extend range, and operate as a pirate action group far offshore. In May a tanker seized off Yemen, the Togo-flagged Eureka, was directed toward the Somali coast by pirates demanding $10 million.

The Houthi question

A run of attacks near Yemen’s coast has prompted suspicion that Somali pirates and the Houthis are cooperating. This needs stating carefully, because it is a serious allegation currently resting on official suspicion rather than demonstrated evidence.

A Puntland official has said Yemeni nationals are suspected among the hijackers of one vessel and that possible Houthi links were being investigated; the region’s director general of ports described such collaboration as a possibility. Abdifatah Mohamed Abdinur, a Puntland state minister, told Al Jazeera the pirates are linked to criminal networks operating across Somalia and Yemen, which lets some groups work closer to the Yemeni coast with a higher success rate — adding that there is definitely a connection but that the pieces still have to be put together.

No party has directly attributed any seizure to the Houthi movement. Cross-border criminal networks and a political-military alliance are different claims, and the evidence so far supports the first more clearly than the second.

The dispute over the rescue

The most recent episode has produced a straight contradiction between Somali authorities. Federal officials described a military operation to recover a seized vessel. Puntland’s Ministry of Security said no military rescue took place, and accused federal officials of securing the release through a ransom payment to the pirates.

Neither account has been independently verified, and the disagreement is itself informative. Ransom payment and armed rescue are opposite policies with opposite consequences: one ends an incident and funds the next, the other risks crew lives to avoid doing so. Somalia’s federal government and its semi-autonomous north-eastern region are not only disputing what happened but, implicitly, who decides.

Why it matters beyond Somalia

The Gulf of Aden links the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. During the 2008–2012 peak, piracy pushed routes onto longer diversions, raised transit times and costs, drove insurance premiums up sharply and made armed guards standard practice — effects felt in freight rates well away from the region.

Shipping in this corridor is already absorbing Houthi risk in the Red Sea and disruption around Hormuz. Piracy is a third variable arriving on the same routes, and the assets that would normally suppress it are committed elsewhere.

Related: The Target Was Not a Ship. It Was the Lane Itself.

Sources

IMO data analysis and the conflicting rescue accounts via Al Jazeera and Al-Monitor; incident counts, pirate action group assessments and the Yemen suspicions from Castor Vali; historical economic effects via Horn Review.