The shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia, which the international naval coalition spent years and enormous resources to make safe, are beginning to look dangerous again. In the past six weeks, three commercial vessels have been attacked in the Indian Ocean. Two have been held. One, the MT Honour 25, a product tanker registered in Malta, was released after a European Union naval task force intercepted the hijackers. The crew was reportedly unharmed. But the warnings from maritime security analysts are growing more urgent by the day.
The resurgence of piracy off Somalia’s coast is not, at its root, a local phenomenon. It is a consequence of a geopolitical rupture half a world away.
A Gap in the Net
The US-Israel military campaign against Iran has placed extraordinary demands on naval assets in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the broader Middle Eastern theatre. US carrier groups, destroyer squadrons, and the assets of allied navies have been drawn eastward and southward into a maritime conflict that shows no sign of abating. What that redeployment has created is a gap — a significant reduction in the patrol presence and rapid-response capacity that international navies maintained in the Western Indian Ocean, including the waters off Somalia.
That gap has been noticed. Somali pirate networks that were largely dormant since the mid-2010s have begun to reactivate. Communication networks are being re-established. Former captains and navigators who had gone into other lines of work are reportedly being approached again. The financial incentive has also shifted: with oil tanker traffic through the Persian Gulf disrupted and alternative routes more valuable, a vessel captured in the right place could be worth a very significant ransom.
The Anatomy of the New Threat
The piracy operation that is re-emerging in the Horn of Africa is not a simple copy of the model that was defeated a decade ago. It has evolved in several ways that make it harder to address through conventional naval policing.
The pirates are better equipped in some respects. Satellite phones, GPS navigation aids, and increasingly sophisticated communications infrastructure have improved their ability to coordinate across long distances and operate beyond the reach of shore-based enforcement. They have also adapted their tactics: a greater reliance on small, fast vessels, the use of mother ships to extend range, and a preference for attacking when conditions — night, bad weather — make naval interception difficult.
The Commercial and Humanitarian Stakes
The Western Indian Ocean is not a backwater — it is the corridor through which a significant proportion of the world’s oil and manufactured goods flow between Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Disruptions to shipping in this corridor drive up insurance premiums, lengthen voyage times as vessels detour to avoid affected waters, and add costs that eventually flow through to consumer prices.
European naval commanders have been candid about the constraints they face. The EU’s Atalanta mission, which has been the primary framework for anti-piracy operations in the region, has been operating with reduced capacity as member states have redirected assets eastward. The US Navy, which played an outsized role in escort missions and disruptive operations against pirate bases, has been clear that it cannot simultaneously sustain a high-tempo campaign against Iran and maintain previous levels of presence in the Western Indian Ocean.
For now, shipping companies are responding with a combination of increased speeds near Somali waters, the hiring of private armed security teams, and the rerouting of vessels via alternative corridors — all of which add cost and delay. The international community has tools from the last piracy crisis. What it lacks, at least temporarily, is the political and military bandwidth to deploy them at scale.