Armed men seized the Togolese-flagged tanker MT Eureka near the Yemeni port of Qana on 21 April and steered the vessel toward Somali’s Puntland. The following day, the Honor 25, carrying 18,500 barrels of crude oil bound for Mogadishu, met a similar fate off the Puntland coast.
By 26 April, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations had counted four successful hijackings within a fortnight, increased the threat level along the Somali coast to “substantial” and warned vessels to “transit with caution”.
A Puntland security official spoke with evident alarm: “The on-going crisis with the pirates is much worse than many realize. There are increasing movements [of armed groups] all over the coast.”
At piracy’s previous peak in 2011, the World Bank estimated the global economic toll at up to $18 billion per year. Shipping firms have every reason to dread a replay of 2011.
A Vacuum Pirate Groups Rushed to Fill
The link between the latest hijackings and the broader conflict in the Gulf is direct and fully documented by European naval authorities. The European Union Naval Force, EUNAVFOR, which coordinates anti-piracy operations in the waters off Somalia, confirmed that the Iran war has fuelled the resurgence.
EUNAVFOR’s Operation Atalanta recorded zero attacks from 2020 to 2022. Hijackings resumed in late 2023 as Houthi operations in the Bab al-Mandab Strait began drawing international naval assets northward, and attacks reached 22 in 2024. The war against Iran, launched in February, pulled even more resources away from the Gulf of Aden.
Maritime security researcher John Longo named the underlying incentive structure at work: “The Houthis are trying to politicise passage, while Somali pirate groups are more likely trying to monetise the current vulnerability.”
Longo added that the fragile maritime environment was altering energy policy planning across the region: “When the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and Hormuz are all under pressure at the same time, naval attention, insurance pressure, routing decisions and crew risk are stretched.”
As a President Validates the Method
The vocabulary surrounding piracy in the Gulf of Aden gained a new dimension on 1 May, as Donald Trump addressed a political forum in Florida. Describing the seizure of the Iranian-flagged M/V Touska by United States forces the previous week, Trump recounted how his Navy fired on the vessel’s engine room, boarded it from above and removed its cargo.
“We took over the ship, we took over the cargo, we took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business,” he told the crowd. “We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates, but we are not playing games.”
The United States launched a naval blockade of Iranian ports on 13 April, ostensibly in response to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
By the time Trump spoke, United States Central Command had redirected at least 45 vessels.
Tehran’s response arrived swiftly. Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, called the admission “a direct and damning admission of the criminal nature of their actions against international law.”
The Law’s Language Breaks Down
The legal consequences involve layers of gravity omitted by Trump’s arena rhetoric. Under Article 101 of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS, piracy consists of illegal acts of violence or detention committed for private ends on the high seas. State naval operations fall into a specific sovereign legal category distinct from armed criminal groups.
Legal scholars have drawn the distinction carefully, noting that the legitimacy of a naval boarding must be anchored in maritime law.
The danger in Trump’s framing lies primarily in the vocabulary it normalises: as the leader of the world’s largest naval force describes profitable cargo seizures as a pirate’s business model, the practical boundary between state enforcement and criminal opportunism becomes blurred.
Armed groups in Puntland operate in information-rich environments, tracking vessels through open-source maritime data and detailed knowledge of cargo values.
The wider the normative space for maritime seizure, the more their operations appear as a reasonable extension of a practice that world leaders describe in admiring terms.
Coastal communities in Puntland have lost an estimated $300 million per year to foreign fishing vessels extracting marine resources from Somali waters with zero local benefit – a long-standing grievance at the economic root of the original piracy surge.
The experience of Somaliland points to a different model: Abdirahman Adam, Somaliland’s Foreign Minister, told Daily Euro Times in Hargeisa that “piracy may be spiking elsewhere, but not on our shores,” crediting forces that are “locally rooted, community-driven, and unshaken by shifting allegiances.”
Keep up with Daily Euro Times for more updates
Read also:
Troubled Waters: Return of Piracy and Somalia’s Governance
Türkiye’s Oil Grab in Somalia: A New Era of Exploitation?
Tug of War: Centralisation Without Reward Brings the Fight Home
