Issue No. 952

With all eyes trained on the Strait of Hormuz blockades and their geopolitical convulsions, discussions and concerns, too, have risen about the perils of other globalised chokepoints, not least the Bab al-Mandab. The threats to the stability of the Bab al-Mandab, the Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea may not arise principally from the escalatory logic that the US, Iran, and Israel have been locked in, but the threats posed from collapse and contested sovereignty offer little relief. Off Somalia's northern coastline in particular, it is transnational criminal networks — expressed in smuggling, piracy, and, less visibly but no less consequentially, illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing — that define the character of offshore insecurity. It is this last phenomenon that provides the foundation on which much of Somalia's maritime disorder is built, and which remains the most consistently neglected.

The IUU fishing costs to Somalia are enormous, estimated at around USD 300 million annually, perhaps considerably more. It is little wonder why, with the country's exclusive economic zone — spanning 825,000 square kilometres — among the richest fishing grounds in the Indian Ocean, including once-abundant yellowfin stocks. That may not last much longer, however, with warnings that these species face precipitous decline not slowing the rapacious incursions of foreign fleets, particularly Iranian, Yemeni, and Chinese. Whilst Somali law prohibits trawlers from operating within certain distances — coastal fishermen supposedly being the only ones allowed within the boundary — in practice, it means little, with any prohibition widely ignored.

Chinese-linked fleets are particularly unscrupulous, accused of plundering oceans at whim, not just off Somalia's coast but across the world. And the losses to Somalia's seas have been immense, with trawlers routinely dragging nets across ocean floors and decimating fragile marine ecosystems. Attempts by local fishermen from Puntland to dissuade these Chinese vessels from such practices have often been met with aggression, with numerous reports of them being fired upon. But the burgeoning relationship between Beijing and Mogadishu in the past years — motivated by a shared anti-Somaliland posture, as Hargeisa develops closer ties with Taiwan — has dissuaded Villa Somalia from confronting its Chinese ally. Though much has been made of realising the potential of Somalia's 'Blue Economy', geopolitical considerations come first, and for Mogadishu, the fish is seemingly expendable.

There is, naturally, an enforcement capacity problem as well, with the Puntland Maritime Police Force — an Emirati-underwritten force — one of the few Somali forces with meaningful offshore capability. But as ever, the political architecture and fiscal nature of offshore fishing remain deeply contested in Somalia. The passage of the Law of Fisheries Management and Development in 2023 was intended to anchor licensing authority in Mogadishu, but with Puntland having suspended all ties with the federal government and federal capacity largely limited to the confines of the capital — barring some adventurism — it has done little to settle the underlying dispute. In practice, Puntland has continued to issue permits for foreign vessels, framing coastal licensing as a revenue instrument and an expression of independence from Mogadishu. While the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission has adopted incremental conservation measures, it lacks direct enforcement authority, and Somalia's Fisheries Information Management System remains largely non-operational.

But what makes this more than a regulatory failure is what the same vessels carry when they are not fishing. IUU fishing overlaps with the opaque transnational smuggling networks that straddle both sides of the Gulf of Aden, with fuel, people, arms, and contraband plied in small dhows across ungoverned coastal spaces on both the Yemeni and Somali sides. The line between an illegal fishing vessel and a smuggling platform is, in this environment, functionally meaningless, with the same captains, networks, and officials implicated across multiple illicit money-making businesses. As early as 2022, Iranian businesses were reported to be contracting Houthi-connected fishing agents and dhows to conduct deep-sea blast fishing off the coast of northern Somalia. How the persisting conflict involving Iran spills over in relation to contraband fuel and weapons flows in the coming months will have to be seen — but the infrastructure for such networks is already firmly in place.

Into this environment comes the promise of yet another lopsided bilateral deal with Ankara, lumbering into view. An agreement signed in December between Villa Somalia and the Turkish firm OYAK — a conglomerate that serves as the Turkish Armed Forces' pension fund — established a company to manage all fishing licences in Somalia's offshore waters. Known as SOMTURK, it was incorporated six days before the agreement was signed, delivering total authority over permits across the entire maritime zone. In another sign of the burgeoning Mogadishu-Ankara security ties, the signing ceremony was attended by Turkish Defence Minister Yaşar Güler.

And yet, OYAK has no prior fisheries management experience. Centralising all EEZ licensing under a newly formed, military-linked Turkish entity once again bulldozes through any parliamentary scrutiny in Mogadishu and raises legitimate concerns about the transparency of revenue flows. The latter issue pervades the clandestine nature of Ankara-Mogadishu relations, with hydrocarbon and defence deals hidden from the public eye but with huge kickbacks believed to be facilitated for Villa Somalia. But at the structural level, it directly confronts Puntland and Jubaland again — both of which have maintained their own licensing architectures as proxies for their contested autonomy from the federal centre. 

Another actor exploiting the ungoverned coastal areas and deep grievances amongst the peripheral Somali communities is the Yemen-based, Iranian-linked Houthis. Beyond the confines of its ties with Al-Shabaab and Islamic State-Somalia, the Houthis' latent capabilities on the Somali peninsula should not be underestimated and are rapidly growing, despite their relatively muted intervention in the morass of the ongoing Middle East conflict to date. In the past two years, the movement has covertly sought to establish its own distinct Somali forces, training substantial numbers of young, impoverished former fishermen in maritime interdiction. Their recruits are not drawn at random; the Houthis tap into the long marginalisation of coastal communities in Somalia, with fishing considered the province of lower-status minority groups as opposed to the 'pure' nomadic herders. Artisanal fishing communities from Bari and Sanaag — such as the sea-faring Warsangeli — have watched their catches severely depleted and livelihoods rendered impossible by industrial foreign fleets that their own government has refused to confront. 

The connection between depleted fish stocks and armed actors is not incidental, with piracy making the same argument. By the early 2010s, Somali piracy had declined through a mixture of pressures and incentives, including the entry of international navies — among them EUNAVFOR's Operation Atalanta, deployed since 2008. But suppression is similarly a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the socio-economic drivers of IUU fishing remaining unabated, driving impoverished and disenchanted young men towards illicit economies. In this respect, piracy is just one symptom of the broader socio-economic ills that continue to blight these peripheral communities.

Operation Atalanta has provided useful surface-level suppression of piracy incidents and, since its mandate was extended, begun monitoring IUU activity — but it cannot resolve the licensing dispute between Mogadishu and Garowe, nor compel Beijing to discipline its distant-water fleet. What is required is a recognition that the sea is an extension of the political economy of the land. Until the conditions that make Somalia's coastal spaces so hospitable to criminal enterprise are confronted with the same vigour as the symptoms they produce, the sea will continue to serve those with the most to gain from the absence of the state.