Foreign Navies Are Killing Somali Youth While Foreign Trawlers Plunder Our Seas

Fourteen young men are dead. They were not terrorists with a seat at the table of global power. They were Somali boys, many of them, who once fished these waters and now have nothing left to fish. On 29 August, a Turkish naval operation freed the cargo ship MV Lutuf off our coast. Four small boats were destroyed. Fourteen people died. Mogadishu called it a rescue. Puntland called it something else entirely, alleging that a US$2.5 million ransom changed hands. Nobody in a position of power has asked the question that matters most. Why were these young men on the water with guns in the first place?

Nine hijackings have been attributed to local raiders so far this year. In the most recent case, on 29 October, pirates seized the Iranian fishing vessel Azini off Puntland, and only an Indian navy intervention stopped them from using it as a mothership to board commercial ships. Shipping is disrupted. Consumer prices rise in markets from Mombasa to Mogadishu. Those are real costs, and we should not pretend otherwise. But every one of these headlines reports the piracy and skips the plunder that created it. That omission is a choice, and it protects the people doing the plundering.

Consider the geography. Somalia has the longest coastline on mainland Africa, and most of it lies in Puntland. The state's security presence is concentrated along the inland Bosaso to Galkayo corridor, where the cities are. The coast itself, rugged and isolated, is left to fishing hamlets where the state barely appears. Into that vacuum has poured an armada of foreign vessels. The European Union's Operation Atalanta is there, and so are navies from China, India, Japan, South Korea and Russia. Their stated mission is to protect shipping. Yet for years Somalis have watched foreign trawlers strip their fish stocks and watched waste dumped in their waters, while the young men who lost their livelihoods to those same trawlers were hunted as criminals. Ask any fisherman in Hobyo or Eyl what he thinks of the foreign navies. You will not hear admiration.

Now look at what has broken the defences. Puntland's Maritime Police Force, established in 2013 with UAE backing, was the first line of defence and still has real successes to its name. But the state's own forces have been stretched across two fronts. Since December 2024, Puntland's security forces, aided by the United States, have pushed Islamic State out of large stretches of mountainous terrain while fighting al-Shabaab. Meanwhile, the Puntland Security Force, a US-trained counter-terrorism unit, fell out with the state over command and autonomy. In 2024 it pledged allegiance to the federal government in Mogadishu. Armed confrontation followed, and the PSF was defeated. The rebellion consumed the attention and manpower that piracy needed. The threat was left to grow.

And here is the deeper problem. Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni, who is expected to run for national president in May 2027 alongside President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, reportedly saw the PSF as a threat to his own position. Politics came before the sea. Meanwhile, the federal government has used force to oust state-level leaders who oppose its agenda, in Jubaland and South West State among others. We are told that Somalia is building democracy. What we are watching is federal and state elites fighting over who gets the coastline, the ports, the foreign contracts and the revenue, while young men drown or die on the water.

Then came the external shocks. The war involving Iran and Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea pulled foreign naval assets away from the Somali coast. Rerouted ships now pass closer to shore, and many carry no armed guards. Pirates have acquired drones, satellite internet and GPS, which means they can monitor shipping and choose their targets with a precision that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

Turkey's intervention on the Lutuf fits a troubling pattern. The vessel was carrying military hardware, communications systems and satellite equipment for Turkish military training in Mogadishu. Ankara's navy moved decisively when its own military cargo was at risk. Yet no comparable urgency has been shown for the Somali fishermen who lost their boats to illegal foreign trawling. When the foreign power's equipment is in danger, the navy comes with missiles. When Somali livelihoods are destroyed, the navy is nowhere to be seen. That is not protection. It is selective sovereignty, and we should name it for what it is.

The United States has followed the same kinetic logic. Early this year, President Donald Trump compared Somali pirates to Latin American drug networks and claimed the same missiles used against traffickers were being used against them. Whatever the politics in Washington, this framing treats young Somalis as narcotics criminals to be bombed rather than citizens to be educated, employed and governed. Missiles can kill fourteen men in an afternoon. They cannot build a fishing cooperative, a port authority or a court system that convicts the foreign ship owners who violate Somali waters. Short-term kinetic wins, as the evidence now shows, can deepen the very resentment that feeds piracy in the first place.

We have to be clear-eyed about who benefits from this chaos. Foreign trawler fleets profit from empty waters and distracted patrols. Foreign navies build their presence and their bases under the banner of counter-piracy. Federal and state politicians trade threats over who controls the coast. And the ones who bleed are the fishing families of Puntland and Galmudug, the sailors on the cargo ships, and the Somali mothers who now wait by the phone for news of sons they were never able to protect.

So what must change? Start with the basics that make any society governable. Somalia needs a single, coordinated maritime strategy binding the federal government, Puntland and Galmudug, with clear rules on who commands, who pays and who is accountable. Stop using federal force to crush state leaders who disagree with Mogadishu. Democracy means the ballot and the courthouse, not the army against the opposition. Build a permanent police and coast guard presence in every coastal district, funded transparently and audited publicly. Create legal frameworks that prosecute illegal foreign fishing and toxic waste dumping as the crimes they are, with fines, seized vessels and named ship owners. Give the young men of the coast an alternative: licensed fishing zones, cold storage, cooperatives, and a legal path to income that does not require a Kalashnikov.

Africa already has proof that this works. Mauritius and Seychelles have built maritime economies with strong institutions, transparent licensing, and the rule of law, and they have protected their waters without turning their coasts into shooting ranges. Botswana has shown what disciplined, accountable governance can deliver when it is treated as a national duty and not a private asset. Senegal has demonstrated that peaceful democratic transitions are possible even under pressure. Somalia does not need to invent a new model. It needs to copy the discipline of those who have already done it.

Regional bodies must stop treating Somalia as a patrol zone for foreign powers. The African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development should lead the coordination effort, with foreign navies in supporting roles and under Somali command. The United States, Türkiye and the UAE, which the source identifies as influential actors, should be required to channel their assistance through transparent, Somali-led institutions and to publish what they spend and what they seize. If you lecture us about democracy while bombing our fishermen and cutting private deals, we will call that hypocrisy by its name.

And you, the citizen reading this on your phone, what do you demand? Demand that your government ask Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Washington and Beijing for a full accounting of every naval operation and every ransom allegation. Demand that Mogadishu and Garowe stop fighting over the coast and sit down with a written plan. Demand that the fishing grounds be protected from foreign trawlers before the next young man is handed a rifle. Demand that every death at sea be investigated, not buried in press statements.

Fourteen young men are dead. How many more must die before we stop treating the Somali coast as someone else's business? The sea is ours. The fish are ours. The future of those boys was ours too, and we let it be taken. Let us take it back, with laws, institutions and our voices, before the next boat goes down.

Based on reporting by ISS