Somalia's Pirates Went Quiet for a Decade. This Month, They Hijacked Two Ships in Three Days While the Navies That Stopped Them Fought Two Other Wars.

Abstract: Somali pirates hijacked the Eritrean-flagged tanker M.T. Sibu 1 in the Gulf of Aden on 20 August 2026, taking its 20 crew members toward Puntland's coast. It was the sixth commercial vessel hijacked off Somalia since 21 April, and the second in three days, after gunmen boarded the Cameroon-flagged cargo ship MV Lutuf on 17 August. The International Maritime Bureau's Cyrus Mody said this week that the pattern reflects naval forces "successfully deterred and disrupted for over a decade" now finding an opening, as ships and patrol assets that once policed the Gulf of Aden are pulled toward the Houthi blockade of Saudi Arabia and the wider US-Iran war closing the Strait of Hormuz. A day after the Lutuf hijacking, a drone strike near Garmaal on Puntland's Nugaal coast killed four men who had gone ashore from the hijack group; reporting has attributed the strike to Turkey, but Puntland's government says it still has not been told, officially, who carried it out, why, or whether the men killed were pirates or fishermen. This piece traces the six hijackings, the naval diversion the IMB says explains them, the funding collapse compounding it, and the accountability gap the drone strike has opened alongside it.

Six ships in four months, two in three days

The current run began on 21 April, when pirates seized the Palau-flagged tanker Honor 25 off Somalia's coast. The Sward followed on 26 April, the Eureka on 2 May while at anchor off Yemen, and the Asana on 17 July roughly 65 nautical miles southwest of al-Mukalla. Then the pace changed. On 17 August, eight armed men boarded the Cameroon-flagged, Turkish-linked cargo vessel MV Lutuf about four nautical miles south of Mareeyo, Somalia, with a crew of six Indians, a Georgian and a Turk aboard. Three days later, on 20 August, six armed pirates hijacked the Eritrean-flagged tanker M.T. Sibu 1 roughly 136 nautical miles east of al-Mukalla and turned it toward Puntland, holding 20 crew members, 16 of them Indian nationals. India's government confirmed it was in contact with Somali authorities over the safety of its nationals aboard both vessels. The French Navy's Mica Centre has recorded 18 piracy incidents off Somalia since April, with at least three vessels still held for ransom, a resurgence maritime security analysts describe as the worst in roughly a decade.

A decade of deterrence, spent on other wars

Somali piracy did not return because it became easier; it returned because the forces that made it hard are occupied elsewhere. Cyrus Mody, a director at the International Maritime Bureau, told Bloomberg this week that "while naval assets are in the region, other maritime security threats are taking precedence, due to which opportunity has potentially arisen for the Somali pirates, who had been successfully deterred and disrupted for over a decade." The two threats absorbing that attention are specific and severe. The Houthis declared a maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia on 20 July, and by mid-August no Saudi oil shipments were sailing through the blockaded stretch of the Red Sea at all, with tanker traffic through Bab el-Mandeb down roughly 24 percent and mainstream tanker transits down 42 percent in the blockade's first week. Separately, the wider US-Iran war reopened after a June ceasefire collapsed in July, closing the Strait of Hormuz to most tanker traffic; shipping through the strait ran at roughly 17 percent of its pre-conflict average in the week before Mody's comments. Naval assets that once concentrated on Gulf of Aden counter-piracy patrols are, by the IMB's own account, now split across two active war zones, and Somalia's coast is the gap that has opened as a result.

The strike no one has explained

The Lutuf hijacking produced a second, unresolved story of its own. On 18 August, a day after the hijacking, a drone strike near Garmaal on Puntland's Nugaal coast killed four men who had reportedly left the captured vessel on a small boat to gather supplies onshore. Reporting has attributed the strike to Turkey, on the theory that the Lutuf was carrying Turkish-linked cargo and that Ankara acted to protect it, though no government has publicly confirmed conducting the strike. Whether the four men killed were pirates involved in the hijacking or, as some local accounts insist, Somali fishermen with no connection to it has not been independently verified. Puntland's Ministry of Security and DDR issued a statement on 21 August calling on whichever countries operate naval and air assets off its coast to explain strikes carried out on 18 and 20 August near Garmaal, which it said damaged fishermen and their property, and warning that uncoordinated strikes could undermine security cooperation between Puntland and its international partners. The same statement said Puntland holds intelligence suggesting piracy groups are receiving political and financial backing from "forces beyond Puntland," without naming them. Two governments, at minimum, one that may have ordered a lethal strike and one whose waters it happened in, have each made a claim the other has not corroborated.

The money that used to buy an alternative

Piracy's return has a domestic driver as well as a naval one. Somalia's coastal communities, the same population from which the last piracy wave of the late 2000s and early 2010s drew its recruits, have lost most of the US development funding that once offered an alternative to it. American assistance to Somalia fell from roughly $476 million in 2024 to $70 million in 2025, and to just $3 million in the first three months of 2026, a collapse that mirrors the humanitarian funding gap FIKIR Institute documented in its 20 August analysis of Somalia's renewed famine risk. Programmes aimed specifically at coastal livelihoods were among the casualties. A population with fewer legal alternatives, patrolled by fewer naval assets, facing pirate networks that analysts say now include established shoreside infrastructure and at least two concurrent armed groups, is not a coincidence of three unrelated trends; it is the same funding collapse and the same naval diversion producing a second, distinct consequence on the same coastline already battered by drought and displacement.

A nineteen-nation answer, still on paper

The regional response so far exists mostly as a proposal. The steering committee of the Djibouti Code of Conduct and its Jeddah Amendment, whose nineteen signatories include Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen and France, has backed a plan to establish a Combined DCoC Task Force in which officers from coastal states would serve as "sea-riders" aboard other members' naval vessels. Its composition, assets and timeline have not been decided; a working-group workshop scheduled in Mombasa for 7-9 September 2026 is meant to build the operational framework, with no launch date yet announced. The existing EU NAVFOR Atalanta mission, extended into 2027, remains in place, and the Indian Navy's INS Trikand foiled an attempted attack on the bulk carrier MV Golden Arsenal off Djibouti on 1 July, showing individual navies are still capable of intervening. But a proposal awaiting its first planning workshop is not a deployed force, and six hijackings occurred in the four months before that workshop was even scheduled to meet.

What to watch

Three things will show whether August's acceleration is a spike or a new baseline. First, whether the Mombasa workshop in September produces an actual task force with assigned vessels and a deployment date, rather than another framework document; the six-month gap between the Honor 25 hijacking in April and the workshop's first meeting is itself a measure of how far behind the response has run. Second, whether any government confirms or denies conducting the 18 August strike near Garmaal, and whether an independent inquiry establishes who the four men killed actually were; Puntland's government has now formally asked the question, and how, or whether, it is answered will show whether the same pattern of unaccounted-for lethal strikes FIKIR Institute has documented in Tigray this month is repeating on Somalia's coast. Third, whether the Sibu 1 and Lutuf crews are released through negotiation or rescued, and whether a ransom is paid, since a successful payout on either vessel would signal to pirate networks that the current window is worth exploiting further rather than a passing opportunity.

Policy implications

For the international naval coalition, the IMB's own diagnosis is unambiguous: assets diverted to the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are not available to patrol the Gulf of Aden, and no amount of Somali-side reform closes a gap created by war zones elsewhere absorbing the ships that used to be here. For Turkey, if it did conduct the 18 August strike, silence carries the same cost FIKIR Institute has flagged in Ethiopia's undeclared drone campaign in Tigray: it cedes the account entirely to local reporting that, on the available evidence, cannot establish whether the dead were combatants. For the United States, a coastal development budget cut from $476 million to $3 million in two years is now directly legible in a piracy resurgence that will cost shipping insurers, cargo owners and, if hijackings continue, held crews far more than the programmes it defunded. For the Djibouti Code of Conduct signatories, a nineteen-country agreement that has not yet convened its first planning workshop while pirates were hijacking their sixth ship of the year is a response running visibly behind the threat it was built to answer.