Puntland Piracy Crisis Deepens: 67 Held in a Year

Despite an international naval presence, the EU's Operation Atalanta, and expanded security agreements with the United States, the waters off Somalia have once again become the nightmare of global shipping after a decade-long lull. The International Maritime Bureau's (IMB) figures summarize the picture mercilessly: after 8 recorded incidents in 2024 and 5 in 2025, Somali waters saw 13 incidents in just the first seven months of 2026, the highest level in 10 years. As of August 27, roughly 67 seafarers from 4 vessels remain in pirate captivity.

And this disaster has a single geographic address. The coastlines where hijacked ships are taken, anchored, and ransom negotiations conducted, namely Eyl, Garacad, Xaafun, Bander Beyla, Marraya, and Nugaal, every single one of them falls within the jurisdiction of Puntland, governed by President Said Abdullahi Deni.

A year's chronology: The warnings came, the measures didn't

The signals of resurgence were recorded one by one starting last autumn:

— November 3, 2025: The Cayman Islands-flagged chemical tanker Stolt Sagaland came under armed attack off Mogadishu; the assailants were repelled only with difficulty.

— November 6, 2025: The Malta-flagged tanker Hellas Aphrodite was seized by pirates 549 nautical miles off Hobyo following machine gun and RPG fire; its 24-member crew locked themselves in the ship's citadel. The attack was launched mothership-style from the previously hijacked Iranian-flagged dhow Issamohamadi. It wasn't Puntland that rescued the vessel, but the Spanish warship ESPS Victoria under Operation Atalanta.

— November 7, 2025: An LNG tanker came under small arms and RPG fire 528 nautical miles southeast of Eyl; the vessel escaped by increasing speed. Once again, it was outside powers, the Indian Navy and the EU naval force, that neutralized the pirate group after days of pursuit.

— January 2026: The Chinese fishing vessel Liao Dong Yu 578 was hijacked; it was released in March after a ransom of $1.2 to $1.5 million.

— February 2026: A Yemeni-flagged fishing boat was hijacked off Puntland.

— March 2026: Again off Puntland, another Yemeni-flagged boat carrying 8 Somali crew members was seized by 7 pirates; the same month, the dhow Alwaseemi 786, hijacked east of Mogadishu, wasn't freed until early April.

With security firms' warnings that dhow seizures are the operational precursor to open-sea attacks plain for all to see, the anticipated storm broke in April:

— April 21 to 22, 2026: The tanker Honour 25, with 17 crew and roughly 18,500 barrels of oil, was hijacked 30 nautical miles offshore and anchored along Puntland's Xaafun and Bander Beyla coast; additional armed men reportedly joined the hijackers after the seizure.

— April 23: The cargo ship Elfriede came under fire off Garacad; it wasn't the state that saved the vessel, but its own private armed security team.

— April 25 to 26: Another dhow was seized along the central coast as a staging platform; the next day, the cargo vessel M/V Sward was boarded in the corridor linking the Suez route to East Africa.

— April 28: The tanker Minerva Pisces survived a mothership-launched attack 471 nautical miles offshore, once again thanks to its own armed team and evasive maneuvers.

— May 2: The Eureka was seized; the pirates' ransom demand climbed from $3 million to $10 million. In the same wave, one vessel was hijacked just 2 to 3 nautical miles from an oil terminal off the Yemeni coast.

Six incidents in 12 days, multiple pirate groups operating simultaneously: analysts note that this density is without modern precedent since the peak years of 2008 to 2012. The tempo didn't slow over the summer:

— July 2026: The Tanzanian-flagged tanker MT Asana was seized in the Gulf of Aden, roughly 26 nautical miles off Yemen's Hadramout coast, and put to use as a mothership.

— August 17, 2026: The Cameroon-flagged M/V Lutuf, carrying Turkish weapons, was hijacked off Marraya in Puntland's Eyl district, just 3.5 nautical miles from shore, and taken to the Nugaal coast. Once again, the force that freed the vessel in a 10-day operation, killing 14 pirates, was not the Puntland administration but a joint Türkiye and Somali federal operation.

— August 20, 2026: The Eritrean-flagged M.T. Sibu 1 was hijacked 136 nautical miles east of al-Mukalla and dragged toward the Puntland coast along with its 20-member crew, 16 of them Indian nationals.

The bill lands at Deni's door

The conclusion emerging from this chronology is searing: for an entire year, every rescued vessel was saved either by foreign navies, by private armed teams aboard the ships, or by the Ankara and Mogadishu partnership. The Puntland administration, on whose coast every single hijacked vessel was anchored, has not a single successful intervention to its name. Worse still, the shadow of the state apparatus itself falls across these events: in January 2025, it was reported that those who hijacked a Chinese fishing trawler were Somali security guards in Puntland, and that a $2 million ransom was paid; in an earlier dhow hijacking, links between the perpetrators and the Qandala district commander along with other senior officials had also been documented. The Deni administration has announced no comprehensive investigation into these allegations, nor any campaign to drain the pirate harbors along its coast.

Yet maritime history had long since taught its lesson: what ended Somali piracy, which peaked at 237 attacks in 2011 and cost the world economy $7 billion a year, was not foreign warships alone, but the closure of safe harbors on the coast. If Eyl and Garacad are once again functioning as ports of the ransom economy today, the international community's question for the Deni administration is simple: Where was the owner of the coast?