A threat once thought durably contained has resurfaced off the Horn of Africa. After more than a decade of relative calm, Somali piracy is staging an unprecedented comeback in 2026, with more vessels already hijacked in just a few months than during the entire previous decade.
The numbers reflect this sharp reversal. While the region had recorded no more than a handful of attacks per year since 2013, and only five in 2025, fourteen incidents were logged in under five months at the start of the year. Since April, at least six ships have fallen into the hands of pirates or armed groups, and more than ninety sailors are being held hostage, according to the International Maritime Organization. Somali pirates alone are said to have been responsible for 94 percent of crew members taken hostage in the first half of the year.
The Gulf of Aden, which links the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and ranks among the busiest shipping lanes in the world, accounts for much of this surge, with eight attacks recorded since May. The year’s most spectacular assault took place on April 21, when around thirty pirates armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades stormed the oil tanker Honour 25 north of Eyl, a former fishing village in Puntland that has become a historic stronghold of Somali piracy. More recently, on August 20, six armed men hijacked the Seamull, an Eritrean-flagged tanker, roughly 250 kilometers off Al-Mukalla, Yemen, before forcing it to sail toward the Somali coast.
Several converging factors explain this forceful return. International naval forces, already thinner on the ground than at the height of the anti-piracy campaign of the 2010s, now have to contend with several simultaneous flashpoints. The war between Iran and the United States, triggered in late February by Israeli-American strikes, along with Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping since 2024, have considerably diverted the attention and resources of Western navies. That dispersal has cleared the way for criminal networks based along the Somali coastline.
Somalia’s domestic situation offers little relief. The country remains fragmented, with a Somaliland that has declared independence and a Puntland reportedly considering distancing itself from central authorities, who are themselves reluctant to intervene directly in these regions for fear of provoking the opposite effect. The pirates, for their part, have refined their methods, now using previously captured vessels as floating bases to extend the range of their operations, from small dhows to ocean-going cargo ships.
Ransom demands have reached record levels, with a cumulative total estimated at fifteen million dollars. European naval forces, despite having located several hijacked vessels, are said to have so far refrained from using force, fearing for the lives of the hostages. Brussels reportedly opted instead for negotiations, without success so far, with the pirates demanding sums European officials consider excessive.
Notably, some recent targets involve geopolitically sensitive players. A tanker believed to be linked to Iran’s shadow fleet was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden on August 20, while a Turkish cargo ship loaded with weapons remains in the pirates’ hands despite Ankara’s anger, which has dispatched helicopters and drones from its bases in Somalia in an attempt to regain the upper hand.
The root causes of the phenomenon, meanwhile, never truly went away. The persistent weakness of the Somali central state, chronic unemployment among young fishermen, competition from foreign trawlers in territorial waters, and the survival of clandestine financing networks form fertile ground that only needed a lapse in international vigilance to become active again.