From Africa’s Gulf of Guinea to America’s Caribbean Sea, 2025 was a growth year for pirates. Globally, maritime crime is at its highest levels since COVID-19.
“Incidents of piracy and armed robbery are often local in nature, but the consequence is felt internationally when, during the height of Somali piracy, we had a large number of ships rerouting to avoid the Horn of Africa,“ said Cyrus Mody, deputy director at IMB. ”When this happens, it has a direct impact on the price consumers find on the shelves.”
Data published by the U.S.Office of Naval Intelligence shows a similar peak in pirate activity. According to the U.S. Navy, both the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa and the Straits of Singapore saw four-year highs for piracy. The office noted thirteen incidents of hijackings, kidnappings, or other violent incidents around the Horn of Africa in 2025 — down from 18 in 2024.
Somali pirates are increasingly intermingled with other arms smuggling and the activities of the Houthis terrorist group in Yemen. The Zaydi Shiite Islamist movement has been waging an insurgency against Yemen’s internationally backed government since 2004.
Often described by the U.S. as an Iranian proxy, the group has recently developed ties to pirates and terrorist groups in Africa, as The Washington Times has previously reported.
Piracy off the Horn of Africa continues to remain a problem despite the presence of a large EU-led anti-piracy mission and a nominal end to attacks on shipping from the Houthis last month. Regional security has also increased in the Horn of Africa.
With a fragile ceasefire holding in the Middle East, more shipping is returning to the Red Sea. CMA CGM, the world’s third-largest shipping line, plans to begin regular Suez Canal traffic in early 2026.
“Piracy remains a persistent threat, but we have taken important measures to increase maritime security,” said Mohamed Muse Abulle, deputy intelligence director of the Puntland Maritime Police Force. “This is a very strategic region and every decision we make here can have global consequences on trade.”
As recently as Dec. 5, a Barbados-flagged vessel was swarmed by 15 small crafts in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait off Yemen’s coast. The would-be attackers, some of whom closed to within 656 feet, began firing. They were only driven off by return fire from an armed private security team aboard the vessel.
Piracy is up in the Western Hemisphere, too, including in the Caribbean.
In Haiti, armed gangs routinely use kidnapping for ransom as a core part of their fundraising strategy, and now Haitian criminals are applying that strategy to vessels moored in Haitian waters or docked in Haitian ports.
Last spring, an armed gang boarded a Panama-flagged bulk carrier near Port-au-Prince. As the April 2 attack unfolded, crewmembers scrambled for safety, hiding in their cabins and the engine room. Still, the pirates abducted two crew members in the incident.
The Gulf of America — previously the Gulf of Mexico — saw five piracy incidents in 2025. These incidents occurred to the east of the Yucatan peninsula, home to one of Mexico’s most important oil fields.
The Office of Naval Intelligence reported three incidents resulting in successful boardings by armed gangs of oil platforms or vessels. Despite kidnapping for ransom being common in Mexico, the incidents in the Gulf of America appear to have been motivated by a desire for robbery. In at least one incident, oil workers fought back, deploying water cannons to keep the attackers at bay until they were driven off by the approach of the Mexican Navy.
Vessels around the globe rely on the same handful of countermeasures to protect themselves from pirates. Merchant vessels tend to avoid a 100-nautical-mile radius from recent pirate attack locations. Armed guards are an expensive countermeasure. Increasing speed, deploying water cannons during pirate assaults and deploying barbed wire to prevent boardings are common tactics used by mariners.
Barbed wire itself is not always a deterrent.
On Feb. 1, the crew of a Portugal-flagged ship in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of Nigeria discovered pirates cutting the vessel’s protective barbed wire under the cover of darkness. The crew took appropriate measures, turning on outside lights, making a distress call, and retreating to the ship’s citadel. The element of surprise caught the pirates off guard, abandoning their assault — yet the threat lingered. For 45 minutes, the pirate vessel was tracked on radar before the assailants finally vanished into the night.
The rise of piracy has led to greater intelligence sharing and other joint activities to enhance security in one of the world’s busiest maritime traffic regions.
“South East Asia is also ramping up its monitoring abilities through conducting more joint patrols and ensuring soldiers’ proficiency in similar scenarios,” said Thomas Linn, an international security expert at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. He cited the Singapore Navy’s Exercise Highcrest training drill.
In the drill, two to five perpetrators board a ship under the cover of darkness, planning to steal valuable items. Such groups are increasingly armed, Mr. Linn said, noting that the region saw over 70 such incidents in 2025, the most since record-keeping began in 1991 in the Singapore Straits, according to the IMB.
“The 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal showed how the fate of a single vessel can ripple across the global economy,” said Mr. Mody. An attack on a tanker or offshore platform, he warned, could trigger an environmental disaster eclipsing the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill — or paralyze supply chains half a world away.
“I’m here in the United Kingdom,” he said. “We haven’t really made anything in 50 years. Everything arrives by sea.”
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