XAAFUUN, SOMALIA – President Said Abdullahi Deni told the people of Xaafuun on the evening of Wednesday 9 September that Puntland will fight the pirates on its coast “the way we fought Daesh”, because the five hijacked ships anchored off the Puntland coast are destroying the state’s reputation and the foreign investment it is trying to attract. In Mogadishu the same day, the Upper House passed an anti-piracy and anti-kidnapping bill by 29 votes to none, the third federal instrument aimed at the Puntland coast in four days, after a foreign ministry statement on Sunday claimed leadership of every maritime security arrangement in the country and promised to raise piracy at the Security Council. President Deni is describing a campaign his forces have already run in the Calmiskaad mountains, and the federal government is describing a statute that replaces provisions from 1975.
President Deni Sets the Calmiskaad Standard in Xaafuun
“We will fight the pirates the way we fought Daesh, because they are destroying our reputation, what we are working on and our future,” President Deni said in Xaafuun, adding that Puntland needs international investment. The Honour 25, the Sward, the Eureka, the Asana and the Seamull are all anchored in Puntland waters with their crews aboard, and the Sward has been converted into a mothership from which skiffs are launched at traffic far offshore. He was speaking at the end of a road tour through Iskushuban, Baargaal, Gunbax and Xaafuun. Along that road he told the far eastern districts that Puntland administers its own constitution and its own statehood until Somalis agree on a replacement for the order abandoned in Mogadishu.
A Security Council assessment published on 8 September put Islamic State in Somalia at between 150 and 250 fighters, down from the 1,200 to 1,500 that United States Africa Command estimated in 2025, and attributed the collapse to Puntland’s ground operations in the Calmiskaad range supported by American air strikes. Puntland raised and paid those forces inside the state while the federal army was committed elsewhere. President Deni is now promising the same treatment to a threat that has grown from five recorded incidents in 2025 to thirteen in the first seven months of this year.
In the same speech President Deni denied that any vessel owned by his government is trawling the coast, and told the crowd that if a licensed company breaks the fishing agreements or fishes outside the zones allotted to it, the fisheries minister was present and the matter would be dealt with. He had set the wider frame at Garacad on 28 August, when he said foreign countries were using piracy as a pretext to land troops on Puntland’s beaches and take the resources of its sea, and that Puntland could deal with the pirates without foreign military intervention. In June he accused President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of having created the pirate groups now operating from the Nugaal coast, and in August he called the resurgence part of a campaign to damage Puntland’s image, the theme he returned to in Xaafuun.
Twenty-Nine Senators and a Statute From 1975
Thirty senators sat in the Upper House on Wednesday 9 September, hours before the Xaafuun speech, and twenty-nine of them voted for the bill, with the chair not voting. The House of the People had already passed it, and it now goes to President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud for signature. Its text replaces provisions dating from 1975, introduces definitions of piracy and kidnapping, extends jurisdiction over maritime crime and sets sentences of between five and twenty years. Submitting it, the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs called the vote a pivotal step towards maritime security and safer waters for Somali fishermen.
Senator Mohamed Abdi Osman, known as Majiino and elected from Puntland, said Puntland is part of Somalia and every law parliament passes will apply there, and that nobody would be allowed to defend the pirates. Justice Minister Hassan Moalim went further, attacking President Deni’s government for condemning the strikes on the Nugaal coast and saying Puntland cannot defend the pirates and that Mogadishu and Garowe see the matter differently. Senator Hassan Dheere answered that the pirates were planted in Puntland the way the federal government had earlier recruited forces inside the state, and that the central government was behind them. He had been outvoted, he said, on a text he had not been given time to read.
The strikes the justice minister was referring to are the ones President Deni’s government has spent three weeks asking foreign navies to account for. The air attacks of 18 and 20 August at Garmaal and Jiifle killed men whom the first reports called pirates and whose families buried them as fishermen, and Puntland’s demand was for the identity of the aircraft and the basis for the targeting. It later named Turkiye, and Xaafuun, where President Deni spoke, is a fishing district on the same coast. The federal response has been to fold that demand into the accusation that Puntland defends pirates, and now to pass a law under which piracy carries twenty years, in a chamber where the Puntland senators who back the text and the ones who oppose it agree on one thing, that the pirates did not appear on the coast by themselves.
A Ministry Claims the Sea It Does Not Patrol
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation opened the week on Sunday 6 September, three days before President Deni reached Xaafuun, with a statement condemning the renewed piracy “particularly off the coast of Puntland”, saying Somali security forces are conducting operations against the networks at sea and on land and that the government will not allow the country’s waters to become a safe haven for maritime crime. It said all international maritime security cooperation concerning Somalia should be conducted under federal government leadership, in coordination with the member states, within a unified national framework with clear accountability. Puntland has not recognised the federal government since March 2024, and President Deni said at Garacad nine days earlier that Puntland can deal with the pirates without foreign intervention.
The operation the ministry cited as its example was the MV Lutuf, which it described as freed on 29 August after being hijacked near the Puntland coast on 17 August, with the Turkish defence ministry saying it supported the Somali authorities during the release. A day after that release, Puntland’s own ministry said federal officials had phoned the pirates and facilitated the ransom, that no rescue raid had taken place, and that Mogadishu’s own defence ministry statement of 29 August was the evidence. Two and a half million dollars paid for the ship left the coast with the hijackers who took it, and the foreign ministry’s statement is now the second federal document to call that transaction a rescue, on the coast President Deni told Xaafuun he will clear.
Somalia holds a seat on the Security Council this year, and the ministry said it would use it to raise the resurgence and would work through the Djibouti Code of Conduct and its Jeddah Amendment to free the seafarers still held and dismantle the networks. It also described illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing as a violation of Somali sovereignty under the law of the sea. President Deni answered the same charge with a denial that any government trawler exists and a promise that licensed companies caught outside their zones will be dealt with, made in Xaafuun, a district where the fishermen and the pirates come from the same villages.
Thirteen Incidents and a Task Force on Paper
Danish Shipping’s reading of International Maritime Bureau data counts thirteen incidents off Somalia between January and July 2026, against five in all of 2025 and eight in 2024. The separate count kept by the Maritime Security Centre Indian Ocean, which takes in armed robbery and approaches as well as hijackings, reached twenty-five on Thursday, when a pirate action group boarded the Greek-owned bulker Glamor southwest of Balhaf on the Yemeni coast. That was the first reported incident since 20 August, and it came the day after the vote in Mogadishu and the speech in Xaafuun. The centre’s standing warning to commercial shipping covers the water within 150 nautical miles of the Somali coast between Mogadishu and Xaafuun.
The five ships already held were taken between 21 April and 20 August, the Honour 25 first and the last of them east of Yemen while bound for Port Sudan, a tanker the monitoring centres call the Sibu I. More than ninety seafarers are aboard them. The regional answer so far is a Combined Task Force that signatories to the Djibouti Code of Conduct agreed in principle on 29 July and endorsed on 5 August, with a working group meeting in Mombasa from 7 to 9 September to draw up its composition, its assets and its numbers. None of it has been funded. Seychelles, which chairs the group and prosecuted more suspected pirates than any other state in the region during the last cycle, says it is watching with concern.
The navies that suppressed that cycle have been drawn north into the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, and around seventy per cent of the traffic that once used the Red Sea now rounds the Cape of Good Hope and passes closer to the Somali coast. President Deni has told Xaafuun which model Puntland will apply to that coast, and it is the one the Security Council has just credited with reducing a terrorist enclave to a few hundred men in the mountains. The federal government has passed a law that awaits a signature and claimed leadership over a coastline its forces do not patrol. Every one of the five ships is anchored in Puntland waters, and the administration still waiting for an answer about who bombed its fishermen is the one that has now promised to clear them.
