Somalia: Sometimes you have to laugh - "Puntland seizes 5 illegal fishing boats, 78 Iranians arrested"

Area involved is circled

Probably not funny for the Iranians but Garowe Online reports - Puntland seizes 5 illegal fishing boats, 78 Iranians arrested:

Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF) apprehended 5 illegal fishing boats and 78 fishermen off the coast of Bossaso on Tuesday, Garowe Online reports.

PMPF Coordinator, Admiral Abdirizak Diriye Farah, who spoke to press on Wednesday, stated that 5 illegal fishing boats and 78 Iranian nationals illegally fishing off the coast of Qow 20km from Bossaso were apprehended by the Puntland coastal forces. “The fishermen we arrested were 78 in total all Iranians, along with 12 Somalis who were protecting the illegal fishing boats,” said Admiral Farah on Wednesday.

Hmm. PMPF.

Iranians.

And 12 Somalis "protecting the illegal fishing boats."

Not very well, I gather.

A Good Read on Somali Pirates: "Hijacked: How the U.N. saved the Somali pirates from the brink of extinction." - By Robert Young Pelton

How an effort to do what virtually everyone agrees needs to be done - defeat the Somali pirate on the land side - was thwarted by a UN program and an apparently overzealous administrator, is nicely set out in Somali Report's Robert Young Pelton's Foreign Policy piece Hijacked: How the U.N. saved the Somali pirates from the brink of extinction:

In addition to going after Puntland, SEMG has also gone after the maritime security industry, the CIA (which supports three antiterrorism units in country), the United States (which trains and supplies Somalia security forces), the TFG (for corruption), even aid organizations (for excess food sold) and the charcoal industry (the taxes on which funds al-Shabab). The arms embargo was originally created to stop the flow of weapons to warring militias. But two decades on there have been no significant or measurable reductions in the flow of arms to Somalia or any real penalty to pirates or al-Shabab.
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In a classic no-win situation, the Puntland government found itself being encouraged to fight piracy by the United Nations at the same time those very actions were being considered by another wing of the U.N. to be contributing to security destabilization.
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Puntland

Just as the PMPF had the pirates on the run, the United Arab Emirates -- under massive U.N. pressure -- shut off their funding for the only anti-piracy program that had a real chance of success. As of June 6, Somali's largest indigenous attempt to control its own security appeared to be dead. To put the nail in the coffin, the SEMG then leaked its 2012 report on July 15, which vociferously demanded sanctions against the South African contractors -- but did not recommend sanctions on the pirates they were hired to defeat.

When asked what their logic was for this conundrum, the SEMG response was "Pirate leaders cannot be sanctioned otherwise it would criminalize ransoms payments, (which) could have a negative impact on the release of crew members."

At the very last moment, the good intentions of the United Nations had managed to save the pirates of Puntland and shut down Somalia's only land based anti-piracy program.
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Somalia: Puntland Interdicts al Qaeda Weapons Smuggling Attempt

Reported about 3 weeks ago as Puntland seizes boat smuggling weapons from al-Qaeda:

Puntland authorities announced they captured a ship carrying explosives from Yemen to Somalia on Friday (July 20th), the Yemen Post reported.

Al-Qaeda in Yemen was transporting the rockets, explosives, shells and ammunition to al-Shabaab, said Puntland Minister of Ports and Anti-Piracy Said Mohamed Rage. He said a Yemeni man was apprehended when the ship was seized.

Al-Shabaab announced its merger with al-Qaeda last year, and Puntland's government has been concerned that ongoing al-Qaeda activities in Yemen might extend to its territory, as fighters have been known to travel between Somalia and Yemen.
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What? You thought al Qaeda was simply going to go away? There's a reason it's called the "long war."

Somalia: Oil Exploration Starts in Puntland

Oil and Gas Journal reports Somalia: Dharoor block exploratory wells started:

Horn Petroleum Corp. has spudded the Shabeel-1 wildcat on the Dharoor block in Puntland, northern Somalia, toward a planned total depth of 3,800 m, said Africa Oil Corp., Vancouver, BC, which owns a 51% equity interest in Horn Petroleum.

Operations have also started on the Shabeel North-1 well with the setting of the 30-in. surface casing and the drilling of a 50-m pilot hole. The Sakson 501 rig will be used to drill both wells, and drilling and evaluation time is put at 90 days each.

Horn Petroleum reports:

The Shabeel and Shabeel North prospects are located on a Jurassic aged rift system which is part of the same system that has proven to be highly productive in the Masila and Shabwa Basins in Yemen that contain an estimated 6 billion barrels of oil*. Both prospects are very large fault block prospects with internal most likely estimates of potential oil volumes of over 300 million barrels of recoverable oil. Source rocks are expected to be rich Jurassic Kimmeridgian shales in the deep portion of the rift immediately down dip from the Shabeel prospects. Reservoirs are expected to be sandstones and carbonates of the Lower Cretaceous and Jurassic systems analogous to Yemen.

Horn President and CEO David Grellman commented "The commencement of drilling in the Dharoor Valley block is a major milestone in the evaluation of the oil potential of Northern Somalia. We have had very strong support from the Puntland regional government and the local communities who are all keen to see development resume in the region after prolonged periods of internal strife. These wells are the first to be drilled into the deep areas of the rift basins and will be key to unlocking the hydrocarbon potential of this unexplored prospective trend".

Oh, look, an industry other than piracy.

Watch for stories about the corruption of the Puntland oil money flows, along the line of those set out in this Wikipedia article. And for stories of the exploitation of Africa's natural resources by the West.



Structure map from Africa Oil Corp.

The Pirates of Puntland - A new blog

Canadian author/journalist Jay Bahadur has a new blog called The Pirates of Puntland.

Mr. Bahadur is the author of a recent book on the pirates - during the research of which he went and lived among them. The book is The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World, a copy of which I have just placed on my Kindle. Here's a blurb describing the book:

Jay Bahadur, a journalist who dared to make his way into the remote pirate havens of Africa’s easternmost country and spend months infiltrating their lives, gives us the first close-up look at the hidden world of the pirates of war-ravaged Somalia.

Bahadur’s riveting narrative exposé—the first ever—looks at who these men are, how they live, the forces that created piracy in Somalia, how the pirates spend the ransom money, how they deal with their hostages. Bahadur makes sense of the complex and fraught regional politics, the history of Somalia and the self-governing region of Puntland (an autonomous region in northeast Somalia), and the various catastrophic occurrences that have shaped their pirate destinies. The book looks at how the unrecognized mini-state of Puntland is dealing with the rise—and increasing sophistication—of piracy and how, through legal and military action, other nations, international shippers, the United Nations, and various international bodies are attempting to cope with the present danger and growing pirate crisis.

More recently, Mr. Bahadur wrote an opinion piece attacking the idea that poverty in Somalia has driven men to the sea as pirates. The piece, "Don't shed any tears for Somalia's pirates," is not gentle on the motivation of most of the pirates:

With southern Somalia in the midst of its worst drought in six decades, the world is once again faced with an abominable humanitarian crisis, the most dire since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. But the international community's sympathy for Somalis should not be extended to the pirates plying their waters, a cohort of avaricious and often barbaric criminals who hold no compunction about turning on their own countrymen to make a buck.
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Piracy has never been directly correlated to hunger and poverty in Somalia; within the country itself, relatively worse-off regions have not spawned greater numbers of pirates, nor has piracy tended to escalate during times of greater hardship.
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For most young pirates, entering the trade is more opportunism than desperation; more pull than push. Like inner-city youth who turn to drug dealing, the “game” offers young Somali men a chance to taste the respect and status that the circumstances of their birth have denied them.

In Somalia, I spoke with Hussein Hersi, whose cousins had been involved in the May, 2009, hijacking of the German-owned cargo ship MV Victoria. Sitting on a veranda one windy day in June, Mr. Hersi described his cousins' motivations: “They're suicidal,” he said. “As they are heading into the ocean, they say to themselves, ‘Either I capture a ship, or I die.' They say, ‘If I don't get a Land Cruiser, it's better to be dead.' ”

Ironically, the pirates' vehicular obsessions often turn out to be more deadly than their occupation. Most lack even a high-schooler's ability to drive, a fact attested by the broken-down four-wheeler chassis that routinely line the embankment of Puntland's sole paved highway. One pirate in the Victoria gang, drunk for the first time, came within a few tire spins of driving off a cliff, his demise averted only by his passenger reaching across and jamming his foot on the brake.

Pirate proclivities have not changed much since I was last in Somalia, as was made evident in a recent exposé by the local news site SomaliaReport, whose correspondent visited the pirate hot spot of Hobyo to investigate how the brigands spent their cash. He discovered scores of Land Cruisers abandoned along the beach owing to various problems – in some cases, nothing more than scratches of paint or a cracked windshield, which the pirates considered beneath their dignity to repair.

For such trivialities they kidnap, kill, and hijack.

The blog and the book are well worth your time.

Hat tip to Daniel Sekulich and his blog, Modern Day Pirate Tales.