Oil tanker hijacked off Yemen, steers toward Somalia
Comments
bmitch3020
radu_floricica
I still don't get how this works. My world image must be pretty off at this point if this kind of thing is possible. A tanker is big, expensive, and not exactly easy to misplace. And for a nation to be able to send this kind of expeditions it must be both dysfunctional enough to allow this, but competent enough to be able to mount it. And other countries allow it? Why? Again with the "expensive and hard to misplace".
MithrilTuxedo
Coalition navy ships (US, England, France, Germany, etc.) are supposed to protect commercial vessels transiting through the International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC). Either this ship left the IRTC or the IRTC isn't being protected.
Ships coming through the Gulf of Aden to reach African ports south of it are advised to head east until they were south of India (past the Maldives) before heading south, and then head due west to reach their destination. It's really expensive advice though, and not everyone follows it.
I was on the USS Momsen's VBSS team in the Gulf of Aden back in 2010-2012. We showed up with overwhelming force and they knew they'd survive if they didn't fight back. It was relatively safe and boring. We had protection from our reputation.
I think the US Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year and I've worried it would make VBSS a lot more dangerous.
Edit: we also didn't hear much from the Houthis while I was there. Things got worse in Yemen after my time.
https://www.maritime.dot.gov/msci/2025-012-red-sea-bab-el-ma...
browsingonly
> Navy's reputation has been squandered in the last year
I don't understand how anything that has occurred in the last year would make a Somali pirate think it's less likely they would be killed if they chose to resist an American boarding party. If anything, they would think it's more likely they'd be killed and that there might be unpredictably severe reprisals against their clan, supporters, etc.
What events were you thinking of?
icegreentea2
As other people have noted, Somali piracy is not "new". It's been happening since the 90s (Somali Civil war and failed international interventions). There were, and still are multinational (basically chartered by the UN) naval task forces operating in the area, to deter and interdict pirates. See CTF-151 (https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/)
These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen.
And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned.
So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.
BirAdam
Much of the current state of the world is coasting on things done in prior eras, and this is always the case. A country needn’t be able to build a large boat now to have built one in the past. They can send that boat around the world until someone realizes that the US guarantee of safe water ways too is something it can no longer enforce. The world behaves as if the USA were its older self, but it isn’t. Also, a large navy isn’t very useful when ships that cost more than a billion USD can be disabled by drones that cost less than ten thousand USD. As such, US ship movement in the area is limited by both Yemen and Iran.
echelon
The world before WWII was chaos. It has never been peaceful to be a human for much of our species' existence.
America was the global hegemon. Under the "rules based order", where America safeguarded international trade in exchange for having the US Dollar at the center, we had the largest period of stability the world has seen.
Now that everyone wants to displace America, we're pluging back into chaos. America is abdicating its role and turning into an isolationist power.
There's going to be an increase in war as countries try to claim territory and resources.
Piracy and blockades will come back. Trading alliances and trading blocs will form.
The world will turn into a powder keg. This time with nukes.
The vacuum left behind as America shuts itself off will create lots of power struggles. There will be a lot of trade disruption to energy, goods, and food inputs. It's also going to be incredibly violent.
kjkjadksj
I don’t know that people have the apetite they did even 3 generations ago to rock the boat. Hearing stories from people who grew up in europe at the time is crazy. People fully prepared to die for their village engaging in guerilla war. I just don’t see the same enthusiasm in modern western generations. Completely passified into consumerism and some semblance of stability that everyone is incentivized to maintain. Completely different than the cultural upbringing of 1940s partisans. Maybe those sorts of people live today in small parts of africa where there are still warlords and a certain base level of violence. But in much of the world I don’t think so.
IshKebab
Yeah that sort of thing can change very quickly, especially with propaganda and strict laws. Do you think all the Russians and Ukrainians who are fighting now were somehow immune to consumerism and aversion to conflict? Of course not.
_DeadFred_
Sound like you've never met a western gang member. I've met plenty of people willing, even charged up to die for much more petty things.
Avicebron
> America was the global hegemon. Under the "rules based order", where America safeguarded international trade in exchange for having the US Dollar at the center, we had the largest period of stability the world has seen.
> ...America is abdicating its role and turning into an isolationist power.
Good thing America is one singular entity with everyone living in it both equally benefiting from it and also responsible for it's current state.
What we are seeing is neoliberalism gone rancid and the predictable fallout.
bmitch3020
The response will need to come from the country where the tanker is registered/flagged. Liberia and Panama aren't exactly known for their Navy fleets. Without that, it's up to the ship's commercial owner to resolve, or more likely, their insurance company.
The crew are rarely trained and equip to respond to an armed attack. If they have anyone to defend the ship, at most it's a handful of mercenaries hired for the high risk part of the trip.
gpm
The response can, and historically has, come from any nation, not just the one the ship is registered in.
For instance in the last (Somali) attack before this, a Maltese flagged tanker was boarded, and a Spanish warship arrived the next day and retook the ship.
wrboyce
I have friends who have been those mercenaries, and I think your comment underplays it a bit… they are all ex-SBS and not somebody I’d want to fuck with!
bmitch3020
In direct combat, you're absolutely right. Most of my point is that they aren't hired to defend most ships if companies do the math and assume the risk isn't worth the cost. The crew that's left are trained to fix the engine, cook some food, and control the auto pilot, not to fire guns.
That said, when mercenaries are defending a ship, it's often trying to stop a small runaway boat loaded with explosives. It's a very small moving target they have to hit with little time. Meanwhile the small boat just needs to be pointed somewhere in the direction of the oil tanker.
kjkjadksj
So you can just steal any ship registered to some nation with little naval presence and no one knows how to handle it? It just becomes the spiderman meme of insurance and corporate and nations pointing at each other and meanwhile you’ve successfully stolen a ship in 2026? Crazy world we live in. The modern age is strange.
bmitch3020
They know exactly how to handle it, which is why it's such an effective business model. The crew do what they can to avoid being boarded, then get to the safest location possible.
Once the ship is captured, it's held for ransom, the insurance company gets their negotiators to minimize the price, they eventually pay the negotiated ransom, and insurance rates go up.
If you're expecting someone to prevent piracy, you need to first run the financial cost/benefit analysis. How much would need to be spent on a military operation, and what's the return that would be seen from the country sending their military to rescue a private ship registered to a foreign country, staffed by foreign crew, with cargo destined for a foreign country?
icegreentea2
There is a generalized military response in place (CTF-151 via UN). The insurance based scheme tends to work because it's basically dealing with "leakers".
UNCLOS permits any country to intervene in case of piracy. Because piracy attacks the public good of assured, consistent, low cost maritime transit and commerce (which the entire developed world is addicted to), and successful piracy begets piracy, there are a lot of countries with a lot of resources deeply interested with intervening.
gpm
> CTF-151 via UN
And Operation Atalanta by the EU.
dgellow
For the « how », you can watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Phillips_(film) to get an idea of the pirate logistics
fredoralive
Oil tankers only have like 20-30 crew on board, you’re not going to need that many men with AK47s to take over. Navies do patrol piracy hotspots like Somalia, freedom of navigation is kinda important to world trade, but they can’t exactly be everywhere at once.
nradov
Which navies though? The reality is that very few countries still have the expeditionary navies capable of doing that. The US Navy (plus Coast Guard) can do it. A few others like China, Japan, India, and France can do it on a limited basis. The remaining countries can maybe send a token frigate on a temporary basis. That's about it. Even the UK, Russia, and Germany no longer have functioning expeditionary navies.
toasty228
All you need is a dude with a small boat, an rpg and some kind of short range radio really.
Aerroon
Is an RPG enough? I feel like the crew of the oil tanker would want to defend themselves from armed pirates even if it might damage the ship some. And modern ships can be quite sturdy.
In 2020 a Venezuelan patrol boat (1500 tons) tried to stop an Arctic cruise ship (6000 tons). The patrol boat rammed the bow of the cruise ship and sank. The cruise ship received superficial damage to the bow.
toasty228
> Is an RPG enough?
Call their insurer and ask, I'm not in the business but I would imagine they're very risk averse
Aerroon
Risk averse enough to lose the crew and possibly the ship?
nradov
Pretty soon the RPGs will be replaced by FPV drones. Put an explosive drone into the bridge of a merchant ship and it's going to be a mess. I predict that there will be a growing market for drone defenses on merchant ships such as radio jammers and nets over vital spaces.
gpm
Radio jammers only work until they figure out the fibre-controlled drones the Ukrainians and Russian's have been making.
Affordable drone defense is something of an unsolved problem right now.
OutOfHere
Many but not all tankers these days do have defensive equipment, e.g. jet sprays, but these probably can't stop too many boats, or if the tanker doesn't have such protection.
ceejayoz
If I have a hose and the other guy has an RPG I’m probably not starting shit.
AnimalMuppet
If you have a hose that you can fire from a fairly protected position and the guy with the RPG is completely exposed because he's trying to climb up the side of a tanker, yeah, I might.
See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship. So they can't kill the crew, or at least can't kill very many of them.
gpm
> See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship. So they can't kill the crew, or at least can't kill very many of them.
Sailing the ship safely takes some skill.
Sailing the ship at all takes about 5 minutes of watching youtube worth of learning.
And they can certainly sink the ship as a warning to the next ship. Indeed attacks in the area have a history of sinking ships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthi_attacks_on_commercial_v...
bayarearefugee
> If you have a hose that you can fire from a fairly protected position and the guy with the RPG is completely exposed because he's trying to climb up the side of a tanker, yeah, I might.
In this scenario you are standing on a ship that is full of highly flammable oil.
There are more outcomes than just the hijackers gain control of the ship or they leave you alone.
If gaining control is no longer an option they could decide "fuck it" and just fire into the side of your hull.
nradov
Fire is always a risk, but crude oil is not "highly flammable". Some refined products and LNG are more problematic.
dotancohen
That might cause the oil to leak out. It's unlikely to start a fire unless the tank is fairly empty.
ceejayoz
> the guy with the RPG is completely exposed
No, he isn’t. He’s sitting in the speedboat with the guys with rifles protecting the guy on the ladder.
> See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship.
You think Somalia has zero people with experience working on a cargo ship?
tokai
>See, the hijackers can't actually sail the ship
Its pretty dumb to assume that.
Somali commercial sailors and merchant mariners do exist. Information and simulator software is available also in Somalia.
toasty228
> guy with the RPG is completely exposed because he's trying to climb up the side of a tanker
Uh? Stay 100m away and send a "park your tanker over there or we fire at you" message.
dmitrygr
All it takes is a world which has convinced itself that it is “time to be tolerant of all and punish none — all misbehavior is not a fault of the actor but instead the world at large is responsible”
Start dealing with pirates like they did in the 18th century, and watch how fast it ends. It would only take a few dozen publicly hung pirates to make the point.
mlyle
Did that work in the 18th century? Hanging a few pirates eliminated piracy?
It's my understanding it was more about the loss of favorable basing and the reduction in Spanish shipments of treasure that caused the decline.
We've killed plenty of would-be pirates recently. Doesn't seem to have ended the problem.
delichon
> Did that work in the 18th century?
It did in the early 19th century. Check out the first and second Barbary Wars. They were not permanent solutions but they had lasting effects. The real blow was the French conquest of Algeria after that.
mlyle
1. Doesn't seem like this quite fits under "hanging a few pirates"
2. One of the big problems here is there's no real counterparty to negotiate with/cow like the Algerian Dey.
That's not to say that I'm against increased anti-pirate action. I just don't think it's as straightforward as you all say.
tiagod
Many ships carry very heavily armed private security. You're describing a world that does not exist.
hvb2
I'm pretty sure that the typical HN reader doesn't understand what desperation is.
You can put a high wall at a border but desperate people will try to scale it. No matter how high you make it. People are willing to cross things like the Darien gap [0], they'll do a lot of things.
If you have nothing to lose, and I mean nothing, you might be willing to take the gamble.
doodlebugging
Desperation isn't even required. There are plenty of people who would see something like this as the adventure of a lifetime and would volunteer to participate knowing that they would have a hell of a tale to tell their grandchildren. Those who engage in things that are extremely risky can find themselves and their actions glossed over and glorified as their exploits become more public knowledge so that even the criminal parts of their past do not taint their resume.
ryandrake
What gets me is that we could have a desperation-free world if we wanted to, but no, instead, we set up the world so that billionaires can buy more super-yachts.
nradov
Who is "we" exactly? There's practically nothing that those of us in foreign countries can do to eliminate desperation in Yemen and Somalia. Previous attempts at interventions have probably made the problems there worse.
croes
And still there are drug traffickers in countries with the death penalty on drug trafficking.
Those crimes correlate with poverty.
You want less crimes? Provide social security to get rid of the criminals out of desperation
senordevnyc
You know that various navies have conducted operations that have killed many more Somali pirates than that, right? No idea what you’re quoting there, but it’s a bizarre caricature of the world we live in.
dmitrygr
Yes, it takes time. It took the British navy decades to rid the seas of most pirates. When a random somalian considers piracy and realizes that the RoI is very negative, hr job will have been accomplished.
OutOfHere
[flagged]
mcphage
> the US will probably take action against Yemen and Somalia
So we’re losing 1 war, and your solution is to start 2 more?
SanjayMehta
It's the neocon version of "you wanna supersize dat?"
OutOfHere
[flagged]
afiori
Naval blockades are an act of war even according to US own laws.
tokai
A ceasefire dictates by definition that a war is on.
vel0city
> Firstly, there is no ongoing war with Iran
Talk about mischaracterization. The head of the Department of ~~Defense~~War has called it a war many times. The President has called it a war many times. Members of Congress of both parties have called it a war many times. It's a war my dude.
afiori
The US and its allies are likely the biggest sponsor of terrorism and genocide worldwide
_DeadFred_
Maybe maybe not. But doesn't change what Iran does. The Iranian embassy in the UK just encouraged violence in the UK. Then next day random jews were stabbed.
SanjayMehta
It's very simple. "Pirates" use small arms and small boats.
The US navy uses helicopters and ship mounted canons.
Occasionally they double tap "drug smugglers" with missiles. Or sink inadequately armed "enemy" ships with a torpedo, followed by a second one after 19 minutes.
The difference is minor between piracy and war crimes: "δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν"
doodlebugging
>"δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν"
That's all Greek to me so I had to translate.
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Very appropriate. Thanks.
echelon_musk
Trump was quoted in the last day as saying "We’re like pirates" in reference to the US Navy.
doodlebugging
It wouldn't be surprising to find that Trump or some Trump-aligned group had contracted Somali pirates to commandeer tankers, guaranteeing them riches that will never be paid. The ships would find their way to friendly refineries where the oil can be laundered into a legitimate stream. Without even including his children, there are so many individuals associating with him who would have the pieces to make something like this happen.
3eb7988a1663
1. Steal oil tanker
2. ??
3. Profit
What is step 2? Normally, I would assume you try to minimize the incentives in buying stolen goods. In this market, nobody is above buying dubiously sourced oil, but what is the likely destination? Do the pirates patiently sit at the oil depot while the ship gets pumped dry, hoping the check clears and nobody shoots them on sight? Once you have an empty $100MM tanker, how do you unload that vessel?
Is it possible the Indian/Japanese/other-petroleum desperate government strike a deal with the pirates?
gpm
Step 2. is (or has usually been) hold ship and crew hostage for ransom payment from the ships owner.
onemoresoop
Either used internally or sold off on the black market at a huge discount maybe?
manquer
Typically insurance companies pay ransoms for crew and cargo .
The economics of Somalian piracy is well documented. How the money is distributed, how they finance the operations and the hostage costs etc
explorigin
2. Ransom
jeffbee
The whole global just-in-time supply chain depended on at least the illusion of the freedom of the seas guaranteed by the United States, which the US unambiguously spoiled this year. Piracy never went away altogether but a multi-polar world where regional powers sanction piracy and provide the pirates with sophisticated weapons isn't going to underpin the same kind of global economy.
dylan604
> which the US unambiguously spoiled this year.
Didn't the Evergiven do this years ago showing that blocking one highly trafficked route would cause chaos?
marcosdumay
Nah, it was already destroyed at the 80s during the Iran war.
The GP's comment is a well repeated piece of propaganda, but it was never true.
We have freedom of navigation because every country everywhere wants it. Change that situation and the freedom goes away, the US's position is irrelevant.
kjkjadksj
If it wasn’t for the news coverage I’m not sure I would have noticed that happening in my day to day life.
slim
US navy doing piracy does not help either
Simulacra
Why can't these ships be fully autonomous by now, or at the very least, remotely disabled and piloted in such emergencies??
nradov
Outside of short coastal routes, the notion of autonomous merchant vessels is so silly. While there is maybe a little more opportunity to automate some watch standing duties, autonomous systems (including sensors) are not even remotely capable of safely navigating a ship in congested waters. You still need guys looking out the windows with binoculars and talking to other vessels on the radio.
Plus on a ship everything is constantly corroding and breaking. If nothing else you need trained crew on board to do preventive maintenance and repair. When a ship loses power in some remote area it's tough to bring in technicians before the ship ends up on the rocks.
vrganj
Related:
Trump on US Navy Seizing Ships:
> It’s a very profitable business. We’re like pirates.
Considering Saudi Arabia was bypassing the blockade of the Hormuz Strait by piping as much oil as they could to the Red Sea, this is going to cut that off (or significantly increase the insurance costs). Things just keep getting worse in the oil supply chain. It's a shame we didn't focus more on increasing the supply from renewable alternatives.