Since March, suspected pirate activity in the waters surrounding Somalia has increased compared with previous years. According to public data from the International Chamber of Commerce Commercial Crime Service (ICC-CCS), this includes four confirmed hijackings, three of which are still active—with cargo and crew captive. There have also been reports of boats being fired at and even boarded by suspected pirates.
“Pirate gangs in Somalia are rebooting their business operations,” says Saleem Khan, chief data and analytics officer at Pole Star Global, a leading maritime intelligence company advising shipping firms and governments. “We’ve already tracked 18 incidents this year, more than the entirety of last year. And we still have quite a lot of what we call ‘Pirate Season’ left this year.”
The conditions he describes are not just good weather and calm seas, but also a shift in focus by navies and maritime agencies from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East.
Maritime security analysts in government and the private sector told TIME that the military buildup around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz had most likely diverted resources and attention from counterpiracy efforts, making it harder for the U.S. and the U.K. to monitor and deter pirate activity. The analysts spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing sensitive security assessments.
“The Somali government is not really stable enough to deal with this itself, so it relies heavily on the U.S. for naval support and the U.K. for information systems tracking activity,” says Manu Lekunze, an assistant professor and expert in international security at the University of Aberdeen.
That green light isn’t just based on assumptions that the U.S. and others are not in a position to police waters around the Horn of Africa. United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a Royal Navy-led organization that broadcasts security advisory notes to seafarers, put out a warning on May 12 describing the threat of piracy in the region as “severe.”
Puntland Maritime Police Forces (PMPF) are patrolling against the recently increasing pirate attacks off the coast in Puntland, Somalia on January 29, 2024. (Photo by Abuukar Mohamed Muhidin/Anadolu via Getty Images) —Mohamed Muhidin—Anadolu via Getty ImagesThe first is that the resurgence is taking place during a period of significant global instability. Profits from piracy have been linked to funding for Al Shabaab, a Sunni Islamist Somalia-based offshoot of Al Qaeda. In 2025, analysts reported that Al Shabaab had deepened links to the Shi’ite Islamist and Iranian-backed Houthis operating in Yemen, a country that shares a sea border with Somalia. The Houthis have disrupted shipping in the Red Sea for years, firing on cargo vessels and U.S. warships.
That cost is not theoretical. At the height of the Somali piracy crisis, the World Bank estimated that piracy was costing the global economy roughly $18 billion a year in increased trade costs, dwarfing the ransoms paid to pirates themselves.
In some cases, exporters shipping from Asia to the U.S. may have to take longer routes, using more fuel—already soaring in price—while delaying deliveries and adding freight costs to move goods across land. It all adds up, and could end up costing major shipping firms like Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd up to an extra million dollars per ship.
“We have not yet heard of goods on board being sold on, as that would require skills that the pirates likely don’t have and would be complicated,” says director of the ICC-CCS Cyrus Mody, noting that stealing the cargo could also reduce ransom payments. “You would also need to find buyers willing to buy stolen goods from pirates,” he adds.
The chief danger here is that the conditions that allowed piracy to re-emerge remain in place. Even if the Iran conflict ends, the ceasefire and security of the Strait of Hormuz will still suck up resources.
Without a renewed international effort to police the waters off Somalia, analysts warn, the latest resurgence risks becoming self-sustaining: pirates continue to operate, their backers continue to benefit, and each successful attack helps finance the next.
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