Somali piracy is back. In the space of just a few weeks in April and May 2026, at least five vessels have been seized off the Somali coast and nearby waters. The oil tanker Honour 25, loaded with 18,000 barrels of crude and crewed by 17 seafarers from across Asia, was hijacked off Puntland on April 21. The cargo ship Sward was taken days later near Garacad, its fifteen-person crew locked up while nine armed pirates took control. The UAE-flagged dhow Fahad-4 was seized and repurposed as a mother ship — a floating base from which pirates could range across hundreds of miles of open ocean — before being abandoned when supplies ran out. The Togo-flagged tanker Eureka was captured off Yemen and steered toward Somali shores.

The Joint Maritime Information Centre has raised its threat level to “severe.” The conditions for a prolonged crisis are in place.

None of this should surprise us. In a 2024 commentary, I warned that piracy was returning and that the governance structures built to contain it had quietly eroded. The warning signs were already clear in late 2023.

In November, pirates hijacked the Liberian-flagged Central Park off the Yemeni coast, later recaptured by the US Navy. On December 14, the Maltese-flagged MV Ruen was seized and repurposed — exactly as today’s pirates are doing — as a mother ship. In early January 2024, the MV Lila Norfolk was captured before the Indian Navy moved swiftly to retake it. The decisive response came in March 2024, when Indian special forces intercepted the Ruen, arrested 35 pirates, and freed the crew.

The threat appeared to recede. But the underlying conditions were never addressed. Pirates watched, waited, and reorganised.

Five factors explaining the return

What has changed between then and now? Five factors, layered on top of each other, have created the opening that pirate networks in Puntland are exploiting.

The first factor is the de-facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Somali piracy networks are not single-purpose criminal enterprises; they operate across multiple illicit economies, including smuggling through the strait. Denied that revenue stream, criminal financiers are redirecting toward hijacking and ransom.

Second, the broader economic fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran has simultaneously pushed up fuel and food prices across the Horn of Africa, straining coastal communities in Puntland that have historically supplied both recruits and logistical support. When people have no income and no prospects, maritime crime becomes an employer of last resort.

Third, US cuts to development assistance and reductions in UN programme funding have eliminated what limited economic alternatives existed. Counter-piracy experts have long argued that sustainable suppression requires onshore investment — in livelihoods, governance, local institutions. Strip that away, and deterrents at sea become harder to sustain.

The fourth is US disengagement. Washington has reduced its naval contribution to counter-piracy and, more damagingly, has likely scaled back the support that gave the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) and its counter-piracy task force its genuine operational bite. On paper, CMF remains a 47-nation partnership. In practice, its effectiveness has always depended on American backbone — and that backbone is being quietly pulled.

Fifth is the diversion of naval attention. Since the Houthi campaign in the Red Sea began in 2023, and now with the standoff around Hormuz, the navies that once maintained a credible presence off Somalia have been pulled in multiple directions.

The two key counter-piracy forces, the EU’s EUNAVFOR Operation Atalanta and CMF’s Combined Task Force 151 are still active — their coordinated operation in March, disrupting pirates using the Iranian dhow Waseemi 786 as a mother ship, showed the operational reflex is intact. But these forces patrol a vast ocean with limited assets – three frigates. Presence and deterrence are not the same thing.

Fixing the governance architecture

The deeper problem is that the governance architecture underpinning naval operations has been systematically dismantled and the regional architecture has not operationally matured to the degree to take over. The UN Security Council mandate authorising the counter-piracy framework expired in March 2022 and was never renewed.

The Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia — the coordinating body that once aligned dozens of states, navies, and industry actors — was restructured and renamed the Contact Group on Illicit Maritime Activity (CGIMA). The group has broader scope but a diluted piracy mandate, and has not convened on the current resurgence.

The UN trust fund financing prosecution of suspects in Kenya and the Seychelles was closed in 2022. Arrests at sea now have nowhere to go. The legal and financial plumbing that once made counter-piracy work is broken.

While important regional institutions, including the Indian Ocean Commission’s Regional Maritime Security Architecture, and the Djibouti Code of Conduct network facilitated by the International Maritime Organization are making progress in reforming national maritime security sectors and organizing maritime security operations, they are now where near to be capable to counter piracy effectively or take military action.

Steps to avoid escalation

What needs to happen is clear, even if the political will is not. The immediate priority: decisive naval action to retake hijacked vessels, unambiguous signals that ransoms will not be paid, and pressure on Puntland authorities to act against pirate havens. The 2024 Indian Navy operation is the model. States with available assets — including China, India, Japan, Pakistan, South Korea — should step up, by either taking direct action or strengthening contributions to CTF-151 and Atalanta now.

But tactical responses alone will not hold. CGIMA, under Seychelles’ chairmanship, should convene an emergency session with piracy as its sole agenda item. Funding for regional prosecution capacity must be restored — without it, there is no credible deterrent for those who finance attacks from shore.

The UN Security Council should address the issue and consider how a sustainable maritime security architecture in the region can be installed and how different UN agencies can support the region better. Maritime security is already high on the agenda, the question of piracy off the coast of Somalia should be prominently featured in that debate.

In 2008, it took years of escalating violence before the world mobilised. When it finally did, the response worked. The tragedy is that the structures built at such effort were allowed to decay once the crisis passed. We are now living with the consequences. The pirates are back, organised and opportunistic, operating in a vacuum that governments created through inattention. The spiral can be stopped — but not by waiting to see how bad it gets.