Why Is It So Hard to Stop West Africa’s Vicious Pirates?

After vanquishing Somali pirates, the world is looking for a playbook that will work in the Gulf of Guinea.

With little more than skiffs, ladders, and Kalashnikovs, the pirates of Somalia once hijacked giant cargo ships, extracted millions of dollars in ransom, and forced the world’s navies to send warships steaming to the Gulf of Aden. They stole headlines and Hollywood’s imagination as khat-chewing villains in the hit film Captain Phillips.
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No short-term fix in battle against piracy

Piracy and armed robbery at sea have fallen to their lowest levels in over 20 years, according to data gathered in the first six months of 2016. The decline is in large part a measure of the success achieved by international intervention and regional cooperation.

Two regions that had been piracy ‘hotspots’, the Somali Basin and the Strait of Malacca, have continued to see attacks on shipping fall away. Success in the waters off Somalia follows the deployment of multi-national naval patrols and the steps taken by commercial shipping to improve on-board security measures, including the use of armed guards. Read more…

Private Military Contractors take the fight to Yeman

Receiving scant attention from Western mainstream media outlets except for a few notable exceptions, Americans and many alternative media outlets have remained ignorant to the fact that private mercenaries from Academi formally Blackwater appear to have been contracted by the GCC Gulf state feudal monarchies to assist in the military war of terror in Yemen against the Houthi rebels and the embattled Yemeni people.

Piracy

Why Is It So Hard to Stop West Africa’s Vicious Pirates?

No short-term fix in battle against piracy

Private Military Contractors take the fight to Yeman

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