Islamists Continue Somali Takeover; Piracy Continues

Somali parliamentarians announced that they will enact Islamic law over the country, claiming that this will somehow reduce the support for the Islamist insurgents fighting the UN backed government. It sounds to me like the "government" is capitulating to the Islamists.

In any event, the Islamists are taking over Somalia and everyone is pretty much ignoring the situation, along with the ongoing piracy in the region.

Various navies are patrolling off the coast of Somalia, but they're not going after the ports-of-call in Somalia where the pirates call home. They're simply trying to deter pirates from attacking along the main sea lanes and attempting to come to the defense of those ships that are attacked. It's a response posture rather than taking the offense, and it means that shipping will remain threatened by the pirates until such time that the world powers agree that something must be done onshore.

In any event, the pirates continue attacking shipping and Dutch commandos rescued 20 Yemeni fisherman who were taken hostage while detaining seven pirates briefly. That's right folks, instead of holding those pirates, they just detained them before allowing them to go back to what they were just doing.

Dutch commandos freed 20 Yemeni hostages on Saturday and briefly detained seven pirates who had forced their captives to sail a "mother ship" attacking vessels in the Gulf of Aden, NATO officials said.

Meanwhile, a Belgian government crisis centre spokesman said that a Belgian-registered ship with a 10-member international crew, including two Belgians, was feared hijacked by Somali pirates on Saturday.

Sea gangs have captured dozens of ships, taken hundreds of sailors prisoner and made off with millions of dollars in ransoms despite an unprecedented deployment by foreign navies off the east African coast.

There's a reason that the foreign navies aren't stopping the piracy. It's precisely because they're not going after the pirate safe havens onshore and they're simply playing catch and release with those pirates they happen to capture. They also allow those pirate ships to continue floating instead of destroying them. In sum, those actions allow the pirates to persist despite the efforts of those navies to stop the pirates. There simply is no deterrence factor unless force is used against the pirates to dramatically increase the risk to the pirates themselves. Instead, the pirates continue attacking shipping in the hopes of taking hostages that they can trade for ransoms that they know that shipping companies will eventually pay.