While local government officials in Hobyo have deputized pirate gangs to ring off coastal villages and block out the Shabab, down the beach in Xarardheere, another pirate lair, elders said that other pirates recently agreed to split their ransoms with the Shabab and Hizbul Islam, another Islamist insurgent group.
The militant Islamists had originally vowed to shut down piracy in Xarardheere, claiming it was unholy, but apparently the money was too good. This seems to be beginning of the West’s worst Somali nightmare, with two of the country’s biggest growth industries — piracy and Islamist radicalism — joining hands.
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Mr. Garfanji is believed to have hijacked a half-dozen ships and used millions of dollars in ransom money to build a small infantry division of several hundred men, 80 heavy machine guns and a fleet (a half dozen) of large trucks with antiaircraft guns — not exactly typical pirate gear of skiffs and grappling hooks.
While some of his troops wear jeans with “Play Boy” stitched on the seat, others sport crisp new camouflage uniforms, seemingly more organized than just about any other militia in Somalia.
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Interesting articles. There were all sorts of tidbits that caught my attention. From the deputizing of pirates for coastal protection against jihadist pirates (letter of marque anyone?), to pirates raising small armies with the money they get from hijacking ships to protect their operations on land. The jihadist privateering concept is starting to catch on as well and no telling what Al Shabab and company will do with this capability. Piracy is an industry that is getting wealthier, bigger, more organized, more lethal and everyone wants a piece in Somalia.
The other little detail I wanted to mention is that both authors of these articles below have taken two different approaches to the piracy issue. Mr. Gettlemen focused on the security threat and true intentions of the pirates, and the dork from AFP focused on what the pirates wanted him to write about. Which was ‘countries are stealing our fish, and it is our duty as pirates to hijack ships’ (hundreds of miles away from your shores? really?). sniff sniff….I weep for the pirate…lol Read the two stories and you will see exactly what I am talking about. –Matt
In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates
In the heart of a Somali pirates’ lair
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In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
September 1, 2010
HOBYO, Somalia — Ismail Haji Noor, a local government official, recently arrived in this notorious pirate den with a simple message: we need your help.
With the Shabab militant group sweeping across Somalia and the American-backed central government teetering on life support, Mr. Noor stood on a beach flanked by dozens of pirate gunmen, two hijacked ships over his shoulder, and announced, “From now on we’ll be working together.”
He hugged several well-known pirate bosses and called them “brother” and later explained that while he saw the pirates as criminals and eventually wanted to rehabilitate them, right now the Shabab were a much graver threat.
“Squished between the two, we have to become friends with the pirates,” Mr. Noor said. “Actually, this is a great opportunity.”
For years, Somalia’s heavily armed pirate gangs seemed content to rob and hijack on the high seas and not get sucked into the messy civil war on land. Now, that may be changing, and the pirates are taking sides — both sides.
While local government officials in Hobyo have deputized pirate gangs to ring off coastal villages and block out the Shabab, down the beach in Xarardheere, another pirate lair, elders said that other pirates recently agreed to split their ransoms with the Shabab and Hizbul Islam, another Islamist insurgent group.
The militant Islamists had originally vowed to shut down piracy in Xarardheere, claiming it was unholy, but apparently the money was too good. This seems to be beginning of the West’s worst Somali nightmare, with two of the country’s biggest growth industries — piracy and Islamist radicalism — joining hands.
Somalia’s pirates are famous opportunists — “we just want the money” is their mantra — so it is not clear how long these new alliances of convenience will last. But clan leaders along Somalia’s coast say that something different is in the salty air and that the pirates are getting more ambitious, shrewdly reinvesting their booty in heavy weapons and land-based militias, and now it may be impossible for such a large armed force — the pirates number thousands of men — to stay on the sidelines.
“You can’t ignore the pirates anymore,” said Mohamed Aden, a clan leader in central Somalia. “They’re getting more and more muscle. They used to invest their money in just boats and going out to sea but now they’re building up their military side.”
Take the elusive and powerful pirate boss Mohamed Garfanji, who surfaced briefly two weeks ago wearing a belt of bullets strapped across his chest in an X and a purple rain jacket to guide a group of foreign journalists to Hobyo, his base of operations. The journalists had been invited by the Galmudug State administration, a clan-based local government trying to gain a foothold in the region. But Hobyo is a fully engulfed piracy community, where 10-year-old boys with Kalashnikovs hang out in the sandy streets and glare at outsiders, and the visit could happen only with Mr. Garfanji’s blessing. During a meeting with Hobyo elders, Mr. Garfanji stuck his head through the door and grunted: “It’s O.K. for you guys to speak to the journalists. And for them to take pictures.” After that, he vanished.
Mr. Garfanji is believed to have hijacked a half-dozen ships and used millions of dollars in ransom money to build a small infantry division of several hundred men, 80 heavy machine guns and a fleet (a half dozen) of large trucks with antiaircraft guns — not exactly typical pirate gear of skiffs and grappling hooks.
While some of his troops wear jeans with “Play Boy” stitched on the seat, others sport crisp new camouflage uniforms, seemingly more organized than just about any other militia in Somalia.
Mr. Garfanji’s original motivation was probably profit, pure and simple — by mustering a formidable force on land, nobody could squeeze him to pay protection fees. But now his associates claim that their pirate army was created to stop Hizbul Islam and the Shabab.
“Sometimes,” explained Fathi Osman Kahir, a pirate middle manager, “you commit crimes to defend your freedom.”
Somalia’s violence has been grinding on since 1991, when the central government collapsed, but it keeps morphing in subtle but potentially significant ways. Just last year, elders in several coastal areas were turning against pirates because of their un-Islamic ways. Now, with the security situation deteriorating so rapidly, elders today seem to ask fewer questions, especially about where their young men get their guns. In Hobyo, a poor, isolated village on a crescent of white sand, the big fear is the Shabab.
The Shabab are the most fearsome insurgents in Somalia — they have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda — and last month they showed how effective — and brutal — they can be by infiltrating a hotel in the government zone of Mogadishu, the capital, and methodically gunning down more than 30 people, including four lawmakers. Once the Shabab take over an area, they impose a harsh form of Islamic law, banning music, soccer, even bras. Offenders can get their hands chopped off or their heads bashed in with rocks.
Many areas of Somalia have given up on the central government’s saving them from the Shabab, which is why local administrations are beginning to gain traction. The local governments are often run by Somalis who have lived abroad, like Mr. Noor, a former Somali Army officer who resided in London for years and still seems to enjoy playing war. (Night vision scope: Check. Body armor: Check. 9 mm pistol tucked into the small of his back: Check.) One of Mr. Noor’s favorite expressions, which he continually barked out to the journalists with him, was “be my skin,” meaning something like “stay close to me” because even though he was working with the pirates, there were still some serious questions about trust.
Still, Mr. Noor said, he needed the pirate muscle to protect his area because “we just don’t have the forces.”
Many pirates seem happy to help. Though 2010 is shaping up as another banner year — more than 30 ships have been hijacked, which means tens of millions of dollars in ransom — the increased naval presence off Somalia’s coast has taken its toll, with hundreds of pirates now in jail and even more lost at sea and presumably drowned.
Ahmed Elmi Osoble, 27, said his family was so upset at him for being a pirate that they basically staged an intervention to get him to quit.
“As soon as I got back from the Seychelles,” he said, where he had been jailed for six months on piracy charges, “my mom locked me in the house.”
“She wouldn’t let me out until I got another job.”
He is now driving a truck for the government/pirate militia — it is hard to separate the two — working side by side with policemen in grubby Galmudug administration uniforms and his pirate friends wearing the Play Boy jeans.
Story here.
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In the heart of a Somali pirates’ lair
By Jean-Marc Mojon
09/02/2010
HOBYO, Somalia — Piracy off the coast of Somalia is booming despite a massive deployment of international warships, with an estimated combined cost of 40 million dollars a day.
NATO, the European Union, United States and other naval powers have sent warships to curb the hijacking of ships yet the number currently under the control of Somali pirates stands at 22, one of its highest ever levels.
Hundreds of suspected pirates have been captured but most had to be released immediately for lack of evidence.
On his first encounter with foreign journalists, Mohamed Garfanji, Somalia’s top pirate boss, talks sparingly and has the edginess of a wanted man who never lowers his guard and is always planning his next move.
His eyes only stop scanning his surroundings when he breaks his silence, speaking with an intense gaze that is both menacing and playful.
Speaking to AFP in the town of Wisil in central Somalia, he thumbs through his mobile phone picture gallery for shots he and his boys took of foreign tuna seiners off the coast of Hobyo, their nearby base.
“See this one? Only a few months ago, 20 miles from Hobyo… And this one, a big Spanish ship,” Garfanji says, raising his eyebrows expectantly.
“Now your armies have sent their soldiers so you can continue to take our fish,” he says, clenched fist and gold wrist watch sticking out of the sleeve of a warm dark blue bomber jacket.
His sidekicks nod silently as they devotedly chew their daily bundle of khat, a narcotic leaf widely consumed in Somalia and whose stimulant qualities make it particularly prized by pirates.
His is a Robin Hood narrative of Somali piracy as a struggle by dispossessed fishermen against vessels from Europe and Asia violating Somalia’s exclusive economic zone and poaching its abundant tuna under naval protection.
Three centuries before him, charismatic pirate Black Sam Bellamy railed against the powers “who rob the poor under the cover of the law” while “we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.”
In Hobyo the following morning, one of his top lieutenants, Mohamed, stands on the beach, clutching his machine gun behind his neck like a balancing pole, ammunition belts snaking down from his shoulders.
The sand-charged wind blows his black-and-white checkered keffieh and cigarette smoke into his face as he squints at the imposing figure of a hijacked Korean supertanker anchored on the horizon.
“This one is bigger than Hobyo,” he says proudly.
The Marshall Islands-flagged VLCC Samho Dream is a third of a kilometre long, one of three largest vessels ever hijacked by pirates, and carries an estimated 170 million dollars of Iraqi crude destined for the United States.
“Enough to buy the whole of Galkayo,” Mohamed quips, in reference to the region’s largest city, which straddles the border with the neighbouring semi-autonomous state of Puntland.
Fighting a losing battle against the sand that has already completely covered the old Italian port, Hobyo’s scattering of rundown houses and shacks looks anything but the nerve centre of an activity threatening global shipping.
“We have no schools, no farming, no fishing. It’s ground zero here,” says chief local elder Abdullahi Ahmed Barre. “And our most pressing concern is the sand, the city is disappearing, we are being buried alive and can’t resist.”
Gathered in the gloom of the council building, the elders haven’t seen a foreigner in years and the list of grievances is long.
“The nearest hospital is an eight-hour drive on a rough road”, “The water is undrinkable, too salty”, “When the tsunami struck, nobody helped”, “This is one of the most peaceful parts of Somalia, why is there no assistance?”
Leaning discreetly against the door frame, Garfanji is listening keenly.
Hobyo pirates have collected millions of dollars in ransoms over the past two years. They even have currency checking and counting machines for the bags of air-dropped cash they receive.
Key players drive well-equipped Land Cruisers, have built new, slightly more stately houses and married more wives.
Yet Hobyo is anything but a booming town, so where does all the money go?
Residents say a significant portion of their income is lavished on post-ransom binges of khat, alcohol and prostitutes but the pirate leaders insist much of the cash is re-invested to expand.
“When we get more money, we recruit more,” says Fathi Osman Kahir, a key Hobyo-based piracy “investor”, who acts as a kind of pirate treasurer.
When a ship is hijacked, he pays for running costs such as increased onshore security, diesel for generators and basic supplies for captors and captives. When a ransom comes in, he takes the lion’s share.
“There’s up to 500 people working with us in Hobyo, that’s 10 percent of the population and I’m just talking about the people on the ground… We have a hierarchy. What do you think we do? We pay wages too,” he says.
A visit to Hobyo by the secretary of state for security of the fledgling local administration of Galmudug, Ismail Haji Noor, doesn’t send the pirates scurrying into hiding.
“What am I going to do? Arrest them all? Even if I had the means as security minister to challenge them, it’s pointless if I don’t have something to offer, if nobody can provide an alternative,” Noor says.
A former military man and a successful businessman who spent half of his life in Britain, Noor is lobbying donors in Nairobi for elusive development aid he hopes could make the pirates lay down their grapnels.
“There is no difference between life and death if you have nothing to eat… Of course, what we do is criminal, it’s undeniable. We don’t love what we are doing but there is no choice,” says Kahir.
While Noor would like to see Hobyo’s pirate army turned into a legitimate defence force and a coastguard protecting Somali waters from both residual piracy and illegal fishing, foreign assistance has not been forthcoming.
Now the biannual inter-monsoon season favourable to piracy is just around the corner and September may be too good to sit out even for the least committed of pirates.
On the beach of Hobyo, Mohamed Ali, a shark fisherman, says his catches are meagre, his fuel costs high and his boat inadequate.
“Being with the pirates has advantages and disadvantages,” he admits. “I have not yet decided whether to join or not.”
Story here.