Somali pirates hijacked a suspected Iranian shadow fleet tanker off the coast of Yemen on Thursday, according to officials in Somalia — the second ship seized in four days. Ian Ralby of the maritime governance group Auxilium Worldwide has described it as the most frequent successful spate of piracy attacks in nearly fifteen years, and noted that it is passing almost unnoticed because the wider regional maritime picture is so bad.

Why piracy went away, and why that matters now

Somali piracy peaked around 2011 and then collapsed as a phenomenon. It did so because several things were done at once, and understanding which ones is the key to understanding its return.

Naval patrols were coordinated internationally in the Gulf of Aden and the wider Indian Ocean. Merchant vessels adopted standardised protective measures — speed, razor wire, citadels, watch routines. Many carried armed private security teams. Insurers priced the risk and required compliance with those measures as a condition of cover. And prosecution arrangements were negotiated so that captured pirates could actually be tried somewhere.

Every one of those depends on a ship being part of the mainstream shipping system. That is precisely what a shadow fleet vessel is not.

The particular defencelessness of a sanctioned ship

A tanker operating outside normal commercial arrangements — opaque ownership layered through shell companies, insurance from providers of uncertain capacity, a flag of convenience, transponders switched off to avoid tracking — has stripped away most of the protections that ended the last piracy wave.

It is unlikely to be broadcasting its position to naval authorities, because being tracked is the thing it is avoiding. It may not qualify for the security arrangements insurers require, because it may not have a mainstream insurer. Its flag state may have little capacity or inclination to intervene. And its owner may prefer a quiet ransom negotiation to a public rescue that invites scrutiny of the cargo.

The features that make such a vessel useful for evading sanctions are the same features that make it attractive to hijack. We set out how that fleet works in our explainer, and the falling volumes now moving to China are covered separately today.

Where the navies went

The second half of Ralby’s observation is the more consequential one. Naval attention in this region is finite, and it is currently absorbed by the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz, where warships are escorting convoys, responding to attacks on shipping and enforcing a blockade.

Counter-piracy patrolling is unglamorous work that requires ships to be spread thinly across enormous distances doing very little most of the time. It is the first thing to be deprioritised when the same hulls are needed for something urgent. That, more than any development in Somalia, is the plausible explanation for why hijackings are succeeding again.

It is worth noting what is not established: whether conditions ashore in Somalia have changed, whether the same networks as a decade ago are involved, or whether these seizures are opportunistic rather than organised. Reporting so far describes the incidents, not the organisation behind them.

The people on board

The part that will get least attention is the crew. Seafarers on vessels in this trade are typically recruited from South and Southeast Asia and are among the least protected workers at sea, often on contracts through intermediaries, sometimes without full documentation of who employs them.

During the last piracy wave, crews from mainstream fleets were held for months and occasionally years, and the seafarers held longest were consistently those whose employers were least able or willing to pay. A crew on a ship whose ownership is deliberately obscured is in exactly that position — and there may be no clear counterpart for anyone to negotiate with at all.

Sources

• Just Security — Early Edition, 21 August 2026, citing the New York Times on the hijackings