Pirates Found the Gap in a Crowded Sea

Piracy rarely announces itself as a grand strategic problem. It arrives as a small boat, a ladder, a few armed men, and a merchant crew suddenly cut off from the world.

That is what makes the recent run of hijackings around Somalia and Yemen so easy to misread. On April 22, suspected Somali pirates seized a fuel tanker in waters between Hafun and Bandarbeyla in Puntland, the semi-autonomous region on Somalia’s northeastern coast, according to the Associated Press¹. On April 26, a cement carrier was seized off Garacad, also in Puntland, with a Puntland Maritime Police Force officer telling AP² that nine pirates had boarded the vessel. On May 2, Yemen’s coast guard said the M/T Eureka oil tanker had been hijacked off Shabwa province and steered toward Somalia, according to Al Jazeera³ and Yemen Monitor⁴.

Look at the map and the first explanation seems obvious: Somali piracy is back because Somali piracy never really died. Puntland still has the coastline, the old networks, the weak enforcement, and the economic desperation that made ransom piracy such a menace in the first place. I think that is true as far as it goes. It just does not go far enough.

The better reading is that local piracy is becoming dangerous again because the wider naval system is overloaded. This is not a story about the “collapse” of maritime order. That would be too dramatic. Global piracy numbers are not exploding. The International Maritime Bureau, the shipping industry’s main piracy reporting center, recorded 16 piracy and armed robbery incidents worldwide in the first quarter of 2026⁵, down from 45 in the first quarter of 2025 and 33 in the first quarter of 2024. That matters. A worldwide crime wave would look different.

But the IMB report also contained the part that should have made shipowners nervous before the April cluster: Somali pirates were “testing the waters,” and on March 25 an Iranian-flagged dhow was hijacked about 400 nautical miles east of Mogadishu in an incident the IMB said could enable pirates to use the vessel as a mothership, according to the same IMB report⁵. A mothership is the trick that turns a coastal gang into an ocean threat. It lets pirates move farther offshore, loiter longer, and launch attacks beyond the range of a simple skiff.

That is why the aggregate number is less reassuring than it looks. Naval overstretch does not mean pirates appear everywhere at once. It means the system loses the ability to keep pressure on every known weak point at the same time. The first failures should appear in places with experienced criminals, usable anchorages, corruptible local relationships, and ships passing nearby. Puntland fits that description too well.

The strongest argument against my view is straightforward: the recent attacks are clustered around Somalia and Yemen, so the cure should be local. The AP placed the April tanker seizure between Hafun and Bandarbeyla and the cement carrier seizure off Garacad, both in Puntland, and reported that piracy off Somalia had declined over the past decade because of international patrols and improved maritime security, according to AP’s tanker report¹ and AP’s cement-carrier report². The World Bank made the deeper version of this point years ago, arguing that Somali piracy grew from political breakdown, weak institutions, local manpower, and financial networks, not merely from a lack of ships offshore, in its report on ending Somali piracy¹⁰.

I buy the mechanism. I reject the conclusion. Local networks explain how the hijackings happen. They do not fully explain why deterrence is failing now.

The missing piece is that the navies and maritime-security agencies that once helped suppress Somali piracy are no longer looking at one problem. They are looking at several. In March, the Council of the European Union updated the mandates of EUNAVFOR ASPIDES and EUNAVFOR ATALANTA, the EU’s naval operations covering Red Sea security and counter-piracy in the Western Indian Ocean, and said ATALANTA’s mandate had been extended until February 2027 while its mission had expanded over time beyond narrow counter-piracy to include illicit trafficking and other maritime-security tasks, according to the Council⁶. That is not proof of failure. It is proof of load.

The load is now heavy. On April 24, the International Maritime Organization said there was “no safe transit” through the Strait of Hormuz, reported 29 verified attacks on vessels in the Persian Gulf and around Hormuz since the conflict began, and said about 20,000 seafarers on roughly 1,600 vessels remained in the Gulf, according to the IMO⁷. In the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, the U.S. Maritime Administration warned that commercial vessels had been struck by projectiles and experienced explosions as recently as March 2026, with mines and combat activity still posing risks, according to MARAD⁸. In the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, commercial shipping has already been distorted by years of Houthi attacks and rerouting, with the EU’s ASPIDES operation created to safeguard freedom of navigation in response to that crisis, according to the EU Council⁶.

Naval power is not just hulls in the water. It is surveillance aircraft, drones, satellite cueing, legal authorities, boarding teams, liaison officers, secure communications, and commanders deciding which threat gets attention first. A frigate escorting tankers near Hormuz cannot simultaneously chase a dhow mothership in the Somali Basin. An intelligence cell tracking missile threats to Red Sea shipping has less bandwidth for slow-burn piracy patterns off Puntland. A maritime patrol aircraft tasked to monitor mines, drones, and military traffic elsewhere is not watching the same patch of ocean for skiffs.

That is the part of the story the “local piracy” frame misses. Pirates are opportunists, and opportunity is partly a function of attention. The Guardian’s April 28 account reported that three vessels had been hijacked off Somalia in a week and quoted Jethro Norman of the Danish Institute for International Studies saying pirates were taking advantage of international navies diverting resources toward the Red Sea while Puntland security forces were stretched, according to The Guardian⁹. That formulation sounds right to me because it joins the two halves instead of forcing a false choice: Somali pirates are local actors, but the opening they are using is regional and systemic.

The policy mistake would be to respond with only one half of that insight. If governments treat this as a purely Puntland policing problem, they will send a few patrols, issue advisories, and hope the old playbook still works. Some of it will. Armed guards, better watchkeeping, citadels for crews, convoying vulnerable vessels, and quick disruption of motherships all helped bring down Somali piracy after its 2011 peak, and AP’s recent coverage credits international patrols and improved maritime security with the long decline in attacks off Somalia, according to AP². Shore-side work matters too: the World Bank’s analysis argued that durable suppression requires attacking the political and financial system behind piracy, not just capturing young men at sea, according to the World Bank¹⁰.

But if navies simply “refocus” on Somalia without adding capacity or sharing burdens, they are moving the hole, not closing it. Pull ships and surveillance toward Puntland, and the Red Sea gets thinner. Reinforce Hormuz, and the Somali Basin gets thinner. Protect Black Sea shipping, and another corridor waits its turn. Maritime security is beginning to look like a game of whack-a-mole played across the world’s chokepoints, except the moles have rifles, radios, and better timing than we like to admit.

My view is not that every hijacking near Somalia proves a grand crisis of sea power. The IMB’s low first-quarter global total is a real caution against panic, and the concentration of attacks around Puntland shows that local governance remains the heart of the problem, according to the IMB⁵, AP¹, and the World Bank¹⁰. My view is narrower and more worrying: maritime criminals have found that a world distracted by Hormuz, the Red Sea, and Ukraine-related shipping risks is slower to punish old behavior. That is enough.

The next indicator to watch is not the global piracy count. It is whether Somali pirate groups can keep a mothership at sea and complete another successful hijacking more than 150 nautical miles from the Somali coast before the end of June 2026. If they can, the April and May attacks will no longer look like a local flare-up. They will look like the first visible seam in an overstretched naval order.