Pirates of Somalia by Jay Bahadur Read Free Book Online Page A

his real name was Abdulkhadar.
    After interviewing a man considered by many to be the father of piracy in Puntland, I was speaking with one of its unknown sons. Over the course of three hijacking operations, Ombaali had served as one of Boyah’s foot soldiers; he was a “holder,” a low-ranking member of the group brought on board to guard the crew once the vessel had been captured and taken to harbour. Or so he claimed; when I later asked Boyah about Ombaali, he waved his hand dismissively and denied ever employing him.
    Ombaali, though only in his mid-twenties, had crooked and rotten teeth, perpetually bared in a leering grin, and his eyes were bloodshot. His hunched frame, petite and almost childlike, barely filled out the standard combat fatigues of a Somali militiaman. A former truck driver, Ombaali had grown up in a poor inland village, Hasballe, that lies in the corridor running from Garowe to Eyl, inhabited by the Isse Mahamoud sub-clan of Boyah and the gang’s other Eyl-born leaders.
    Ombaali seemed able to remember scant details of his pirating career. He claimed that the three ships on which he had served were hijacked sometime in 2008, though his most precise guess was that they were taken during “the early months of the year.” The only other facts he was able to recall were the nationalities of two of the ships—Japanese and Yemeni—and, not surprisingly, the exact ransom amounts.
    “We got $1.8 million for the Japanese tanker,” he said, of a vessel carrying a cargo of crude oil. “And $1.6 million for the other one.” The owners of the smaller Yemeni ship, on the other hand, did not deem the vessel or her crew to be worth ransoming, and in the end the gang simply let it go. Checking up on his story afterwards, I discovered only one vessel captured in 2008 that matched Ombaali’s description: the MT Stolt Valor , a Japanese-owned chemical tanker hijacked in the Gulf of Aden while transporting oil products. Although the ransom paid to release the ship—reported to be between $1 million and $2.5 million—fits Ombaali’s account, the Stolt Valor was seized on September 15, hardly “the early months of the year.”
    Ombaali paused to take a pinch of sugar from the bowl in the middle of the table, casually depositing it into his mouth. I hurriedly offered him some tea for the second time, but he shook his head, seeming surprised at my solicitude.
    There were fifty individuals in his gang, he said, of whom fifteen were “attackers”—those who carried out the hijacking—and the remaining thirty-five were holders, such as himself. Ombaali differed slightly from Boyah in his account of how ransoms had been divided, telling me that 50 per cent was split amongst the attackers, 30 per cent went to the investors, and the remaining 20 per cent to the holders; unlike Boyah, Ombaali had no recollection of any money going to charity. Given that an attacker earned almost six times as much as a holder, I asked Ombaali why he had been content to settle for a blue-collar position.
    “There is a management board, run by Boyah and others, that selects the attackers,” he explained, presumably a reference to Boyah’s Central Committee. “If I had stayed with the group, eventually I would have become an attacker.”
    Eight of the group’s attackers, said Ombaali, had previous histories with the Somali-Canadian Coast Guard (SomCan), a private security firm that provided coast guard services to the Puntland government from 2002 to 2005, and again in 2008. “They were the most experienced at attacking and capturing,” said Ombaali. They were probably also the most expert at marine navigation, including the operation of global positioning systems and other equipment. “GPS was very important,” Ombaali confirmed. “We would never launch an operation without one.”
    The group had an interpreter, a Mogadishan named Yusuf, who had the dual responsibility of communicating with the crew as well as handling the