EYL, SOMALIA – Four men died on Tuesday afternoon when a drone destroyed the small boat carrying them near Garmaal on the Nugaal coast, a day after eight armed men boarded the Cameroon flagged cargo ship MV Lutuf four nautical miles south of Mareeyo. No government, military coalition or private contractor has claimed the strike, and communities along the Nugaal shoreline have spent the week watching foreign warships and unmanned aircraft work a stretch of water that formally belongs to a federal republic whose president spent the same days touring Galmudug. The piracy that returned to these anchorages in April is now run from a captured merchant ship, and the answer to it has arrived from an aircraft that nobody will put a flag on.
The Strike Nobody Will Claim
The men had left the hijacked vessel in a skiff to gather supplies on shore when the drone found them, and four of them were killed near Garmaal on Tuesday. A separate account of what appears to be the same incident places the destroyed skiff further south off Eyl district, with all four people aboard feared dead. Some reports had the boat making for the MV Sward, the cement carrier that pirates have held off the Puntland coast since April, though residents along that shoreline disputed the claim and said it was on a different errand. Whichever version proves correct, the strike happened inside a Nugaal coastal district where foreign naval vessels and unmanned aircraft have been observed for several days.
Attribution is where the account stops, since unverified reports have linked the strike to Turkish forces operating off the Somali coast while neither Ankara nor Villa Somalia nor Garowe has issued any statement. The maritime security organisations that log every boarding and every suspicious approach in these waters have confirmed neither the attack, nor the death toll, nor the identity of whoever ordered it. Four people were killed by an aircraft over Somali territory on Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning no state had accepted that the aircraft was its own.
An unclaimed strike carries no published legal basis, no casualty assessment and no route of complaint for anyone on the Nugaal coast who believes the wrong boat was hit. Fishermen there work the same wooden skiffs the pirates use, and a strike that nobody owns leaves any error in that identification with nowhere to go. Baidoa spent last weekend burning a foreign flag over this exact question after drone strikes in the Southwest countryside, and the protest there turned on the plain fact that no official in a Somali uniform could say who had authorised the aircraft overhead. The Nugaal coast has now inherited the same problem with a maritime face on it.
A Pirate Economy Anchored Off Nugaal
The MV Lutuf was boarded at 11:36 UTC on 17 August, four nautical miles south of Mareeyo, by eight armed men who reached the citadel where the crew had sheltered and moved them onto the bridge. It was the fifth seizure in these waters since April, and by the middle of last week four merchant vessels were being held by Somali pirate groups. Monsoon conditions usually suppress skiff launches along this coast through August, so an operation at that tempo measures how far the crews have pushed their working season. The threat level for the Somali basin now sits at substantial.
The organising asset is the MV Sward, a St Kitts and Nevis flagged cement carrier taken six nautical miles northeast of Garacad on 26 April while running from Suez to Mombasa, with thirteen Syrian and two Indian crew still aboard. Pirates anchored it off the coast and turned it into a mothership, the tactic that defined the crisis of 2008 to 2011, because a merchant hull carries an attack skiff and its fuel far past the horizon. On 16 July they used it to take two Iranian fishing dhows, which were released after a payment of twenty thousand dollars. The tankers Honour 25 and MT Eureka are held alongside it, with forty four seafarers between the three vessels and the United Nations maritime agency warning that food, water and the conditions of captivity are deteriorating.
The crews running these operations are new to the trade. Security officials describe rural young men out of the Garacad hinterland, an area heavy with weapons and short of everything else, drawn from a single clan and sub-clan and driven by poverty and by the foreign trawlers working the shelf off the Nugaal and Mudug coasts under licences that nobody on this shoreline recognises. That last grievance is the oldest one in Somali piracy and it has gone unanswered at sea and on land for twenty years. The arithmetic has simply improved again, and the Nugaal anchorages sit close enough to the shipping lanes to make a skiff worth launching.
The Waters Mogadishu Signed Away
Responsibility for policing this coastline was contracted out two years ago. In February 2024 the federal cabinet approved a ten year defence and economic cooperation agreement with Turkiye that authorises Ankara to build, train and equip a Somali navy and to protect and defend Somali territorial waters, on reported terms handing Turkiye thirty percent of revenue from the exclusive economic zone. The state answerable for what happens off the Nugaal coast is therefore a foreign one, acting on a mandate granted by a federal executive whose own term expired on 15 May. Ankara has not said whether the aircraft over Eyl was flying under that authority.
Puntland never signed that agreement and has said so consistently. The administration in Garowe argues that Mogadishu negotiates over Puntland’s coastline, its ports and its security arrangements without the state in the room, and it points to the arms consignments it has intercepted and the federally recruited units it has since absorbed as the same practice in another form. President Said Abdullahi Deni went further this year and accused President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of creating armed pirate groups, a charge Villa Somalia rejects. Whatever weight that accusation carries, the structural complaint underneath it is legible this week on the Nugaal coast, where an aircraft operating under somebody’s authority killed four people inside a Puntland district and no Somali institution has been asked to account for it.
Villa Somalia has meanwhile spent August arguing that it needs less outside help, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told African partners on Sunday that Somalia no longer requires foreign peacekeepers to guarantee its own security. He said it four days after presiding over the largest army graduation since 1991, and eight days before the mission he wants to see leave begins its final funded quarter. A claim of self sufficiency reads differently against a maritime zone policed under foreign contract, a coastline where four ships are being held, and a strike that Somalia can neither claim nor disown.
A Coast Below the Political Calendar
Nothing on the Nugaal coast competed for federal attention this week. The president was in Galmudug on a tour that reached one neighbourhood of Galkayo, the army was fighting militias loyal to a removed president inside Baidoa, and the chamber that elected a new speaker this month is still absorbing the objections to that vote. The maritime file enters the calendar when a ship is taken, and it leaves again within the news cycle. Every one of the political fights consuming Mogadishu this month is a fight with a Somali counterpart, and none of them puts a patrol boat off Garacad.
The external layer is thinning at the same time. International naval assets that once ran the Somali basin have been drawn north into the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden by the campaign against shipping there, leaving the corridor off Puntland the least watched water in the region. The logistics arm that sustained the African Union mission is already selling the mission for parts, with its funding running out in December. Global piracy and armed robbery incidents rose seventeen percent between 2024 and 2025, from 146 to 171, and the crisis of 2008 to 2011 cost the world economy an estimated eighteen billion dollars a year at its peak.
What counter piracy exists on the Nugaal coast is being done by Puntland with courts, police and its own maritime units. Garowe has prosecuted the networks it can reach, executing a man in July for the murder of the Jariiban district police commander, an officer who had spent his career on arms trafficking and the piracy economy along the Mudug shoreline. The work is slow because some coastal communities shelter the crews, and because the state is simultaneously fighting the Islamic State in the Calmiskaad range and holding a line at Galkayo against the federal government. Nothing about the Nugaal coast this week required a decision from Mogadishu, and nothing about it produced one.
