GAROWE, SOMALIA – Somalia’s state minister for defence has told reporters in Mogadishu that the federal government knew in advance of the air strikes killing coastal men in Puntland’s Nugaal region, that Mogadishu alone holds the legal authority to license operations against pirates in Somali waters, and that a full account of the attacks around the hijacked cargo ship MV Lutuf will follow once the facts are established. Omar Ali Abdi then asked Puntland to produce evidence that the dead were fishermen. Within two days a further strike near Jiifle had killed as many as nine more men, and Ankara had said only that it held no information indicating Turkish aircraft were involved. The MV Lutuf now sits at the centre of an air campaign that a government claims to have permitted and cannot attribute to anybody.
Small Boats Around the MV Lutuf
Eight armed men boarded the Cameroon-flagged MV Lutuf on 17 August roughly three and a half nautical miles off Marraya, in the Eyl district of Nugaal, taking a crew of ten that comprised six Indian nationals, a Turkish national, a Georgian and two Serbian security contractors. The cargo in the hold was weapons, communications equipment and satellite technology consigned to the Turkish military training facility that Ankara runs in Mogadishu, which turned an ordinary hijacking on a coast with a long piracy history into an incident touching the supply line of a foreign army. Ankara has since demanded the vessel’s release, which places a NATO member’s government in direct correspondence about a ship anchored off a Somali fishing village.
What followed has been a sequence of strikes on small boats moving between the shore and the anchorage. Four men died near Garmaal on 18 August and two more were wounded, and the first accounts filed them as pirates before relatives and neighbours identified all four by name as fishermen with no part in the seizure. Puntland’s security ministry subsequently placed a further attack on 20 August in the statement through which it demanded an account from the navies operating off its shore. No government has claimed any of them, and none has published a target list, a casualty assessment or a legal basis for the operation.
On Sunday 23 August, after the MV Lutuf had been moved towards the Jiifle shoreline in Godobjiran district, a missile struck a skiff carrying what local accounts put at around ten men. A Jiifle resident who reached the site described eight bodies too badly burned for their faces to be made out, and said some of the young men aboard were known locally as fishermen without being able to say where the boat had come from. Turkish helicopters and unmanned aircraft have worked that stretch of coast throughout, and two Turkish-owned vessels closed on the MV Lutuf after the seizure.
Who Authorised the MV Lutuf Strikes
Omar Ali Abdi broke five days of federal silence on Saturday 22 August, telling journalists in Mogadishu that the government had prior knowledge of the operation around the MV Lutuf and questioning whether Puntland could substantiate its claim that the men killed at Garmaal were civilians. He asserted, in the same remarks, that the federal government is the authority legally competent to determine military operations against piracy along Somalia’s coastline, and promised that a comprehensive report would be issued once his ministry finished its assessment. He identified no vessel, no air force and no flag.
A state asserting the exclusive right to license lethal force in its own waters, while unable to say which force exercised that licence, has described a permission granted to a party it declines to name. Nor did the minister say when the government was told, by whom, or whether it agreed to anything. The promised report cannot be written without ending in a name, and Mogadishu has spent three years outsourcing the equipment, the training and the airpower that keep the federal project standing, which narrows the field of candidates considerably. Somalia operates no air force capable of putting a missile into a moving skiff at sea, so the licence in question was granted to somebody else’s pilots.
Ankara’s own contribution, delivered to a broadcaster’s Somali service on Monday, was that it had no information indicating Turkish warplanes conducted airstrikes in those waters. Some outlets have reported that formulation as a denial and others have read it as deliberately short of one, and the two readings can coexist because the sentence describes the ministry’s state of knowledge instead of the air force’s conduct. A government whose ships and helicopters are circling the vessel, and which is publicly demanding its release, has the standing to say plainly whether its aircraft fired on the boats around the MV Lutuf. It has chosen a form of words that avoids the question, and nobody in Mogadishu has pressed it for a better one.
Puntland Asks Who Fired and Mogadishu Asks for Proof
Puntland’s position through all of this has been narrow and procedural. Its security ministry condemned the piracy resurgence, identified the men killed at Garmaal as civilians, and asked the governments behind the international warships near the MV Lutuf to explain who conducted the strikes and on what basis, warning that operations harming fishermen and their property would damage the working relationship between Puntland’s agencies and the international partners engaged against piracy. Its deputy information minister has since argued that men suspected of a crime were entitled to legal process, and that killing them without it breaches international law, a proposition the federal defence ministry has not engaged with.
The same week, the fisheries ministry in Garowe warned shipowners, operators and insurers against paying ransoms, arguing that payment supplies both the money and the incentive for the next seizure and draws new entrants into networks that had gone dormant. It said preliminary information indicated that groups based outside Puntland were offering financial support to men formerly linked to piracy, and President Said Abdullahi Deni has described the resurgence as a campaign aimed at Puntland’s reputation. Garowe has published no evidence for that reading and has named nobody, and it has kept its complaint inside the counter-piracy framework by asking for an explanation instead of a withdrawal, and by continuing to offer the coastline it controls as a base for the work.
Against that, the federal minister’s request is a striking one. The administration that polices this coastline, runs its courts and buries its dead has been asked to produce documentary proof of who its own drowned villagers were, by a government several hundred kilometres away that cannot identify the aircraft. Mogadishu says it was told before the strikes came. Puntland’s information ministry says it has received no official details, no confirmed casualty figure and no explanation at all, and has opened its own investigation because nobody has given it one.
The Coast Somalia Governs by Communique
These strikes are landing in the precise weeks when the international scaffolding around Somali security is being taken apart. The United Nations has begun issuing termination letters and auctioning mission property, and the support system beneath the African Union force is disappearing months before anyone has funded the exit. Multilateral operations answer to committees, publish mandates and can be questioned in public forums; the bilateral arrangements replacing them answer to whoever signed them, which in Somalia’s case means a presidency whose own electoral timetable expired in May. The difference between the two shows up precisely at the moment somebody has to be asked a question.
The maritime picture underneath is deteriorating on its own terms. Thirteen vessels have been attacked in Somali waters this year against five in the whole of 2025, more than ninety seafarers are being held aboard captured ships, and the naval assets that once suppressed this traffic have been redrawn towards the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Into that gap have come aircraft nobody will claim, striking small wooden boats on a coast where almost every small wooden boat belongs to somebody fishing. An Indian naval deployment recovered twenty-two of its own nationals from two captured ships in the same week. Some of the men around the MV Lutuf may well be hijackers, and no mechanism now exists by which anyone could establish it.
Somalia’s federal government has made two claims about the Nugaal coast in the space of a week. It knew the strikes were coming, and it alone may authorise them. Neither claim survives contact with the question Puntland put in writing on 21 August, because a government that licenses an operation knows its licensee. The report Omar Ali Abdi has promised will either produce that name or confirm that the authority he invoked over the MV Lutuf was decorative, and Garowe has already made clear which of the two it expects.
