On Saturday, Somali pirates approached the Spanish frigate Infanta Cristina (pictured) as the warship escorted a supply vessel off the Somali coast. "The Spanish warship increased speed and maneuvered immediately in order to place herself between MV *Izumi *and her escort [the supply ship]," the E.U.'s naval command reported. It's not clear whether shots were fired; in any case, the pirates fled empty-handed.
The attempted hijacking is not unusual. There have been more than 170 pirate attacks off the Somali coast this year, resulting in around 40 captured ships. But some observers are reading into the circumstances of Saturday's attacks and seeing something more disturbing: signs of cooperation between terrorists and pirates. But this alarming conclusion rests on a string of faulty assumptions. For years, observers have warned of a terrorist-pirate team-up, but the facts don't necessarily support their fears.
Here's the argument for the terrorist-pirate connection in Saturday's attack, as made by Raymond Pritchett at Information Dissemination. First, the escorted supply ship, Petra I, had been chartered to carry supplies to the African Union peacekeeping force, codenamed "AMISOM," that's barely clinging to life in and around Mogadishu's seaport. The rest of the city -- and much of south and central Somalia -- is controlled by Al Shabab, the main Somali Islamic group and a new member of the "international terror" club.
Also, Pritchett noted that Izumi, in her pirate guise, had been spotted operating out of the port of Xarardheere, a "notorious pirate den" ostensibly controlled by Shabab. Pritchett connected the dots. "It looks like Al Shabaab hijacked a ship in order to go after the AMISOM supply vessel." If true, that would make Saturday's incident the first time Shabab has attacked from the sea.
For years, ill-informed Western observers have assumed that pirates and terrorists are pretty much the same thing, but nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, in Somali piracy is strictly a commercial venture, compared to Shabab's ideological motivation. Shabab and other Islamic groups actually cracked down on piracy, calling it "un-Islamic." One Islamist propagandist even penned a "counter-piracy" strategy, calling for joint U.N.-Somali patrols around pirate ports.
Indeed, the same confusion -- conflating terrorists and pirates -- could underpin Pritchett's analysis. He assumes Izumi was operated by terrorists because it hailed from a town fully controlled by Shabab. In fact, it appears the residents of Xarardheere are actively resisting Shabab rule: perhaps the Islamists' control is not as complete as Pritchett imagines.
What's more, Pritchett assumes Izumi's piratical crew actually knew which vessels they were attacking. In fact, it's so hard for pirates to intercept any vessel at all on roughly a million square miles of ocean that they usually attack any ship they see, even if it's a 40,000-ton American warship. For that reason, it was probably mere chance that they assaulted a peacekeeper ship.
It's possible we just witnessed a sea-change in terrorist tactics -- possible, just not likely.
Photo: E.U.
