Word: somali
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...Somalia Pirates Aim Higher With their capture of a colossal Saudi oil tanker on Nov. 15, Somali pirates seized their largest vessel yet amid a torrent of other hijackings in the Gulf of Aden, where there have been at least eight attacks in just the past two weeks. Pirates currently hold an estimated 17 vessels and some 300 crew for ransom. Some shipping firms are resorting to the long, costly route around Africa to avoid the gulf's dangerous waters...
...Piracy is supposed to be one of those things that isn’t a problem anymore—much like polio, pantaloons, and the threat of the Visigoths sacking Rome. However, 2008 is shaping up to be a banner year for Somali pirates who operate around the Gulf of Aden. The IMB reports that so far in 2008 there have been 92 pirate attacks on ships compared with 31 last year and 10 in 2006. The problem has grown so serious that insurers last May declared the Gulf of Aden a “war risk” zone...
...member crew early Saturday morning in the Indian Ocean might trigger new thinking on whether to launch such a strike. It was shocking on two counts. One, the pirates have typically taken vessels within 200 miles of shore, but the supertanker was taken 450 miles off the Somali coast. International navies have been protecting a narrow corridor farther north toward the Gulf of Aden, but this seizure demonstrates the pirates' dramatically expanded reach. Two, the buccaneers have never taken over an oil supertanker, capable of carrying 2 million barrels of oil. It is the biggest ship ever seized...
...pirates, largely from lawless coastal Somali towns, have basically turned the heavily plied route through the Gulf of Aden and into the Indian Ocean into a toll road. But as the pirates are becoming more brazen, the international community's patience is running out. "Right now, it's just cheaper to pay the ransom," says Zinni, who led the pullout of U.N. troops from Somalia in 1995. "But just wait until a cruise ship gets taken down and there's some sort of miscalculation and a bunch of people get killed...
...poverty make it an ideal breeding ground for piracy, and the Cold War's end helped make that possible. "I can remember driving down the roads in Somalia, and you'd see all these scrap heaps of MiGs and tanks" from the 1969-1991 reign of Siad Barre, the Somali dictator allied with the Soviet Union, Zinni says. "During the Cold War, one side or the other kept authoritarian regimes in power who controlled this sort of thing...