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The Pirates of Somalia
Jay Bahadur
Inside Their Hidden World
Pantheon
July 2011
On Sale: July 19, 2011
320 pages
ISBN: 030737906X
EAN: 9780307379061
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Somalia, on the tip of the Horn of Africa, has been
inhabited as far back as 9,000 BC. Its history is as rich as
the country is old. Caught up in a decades-long civil war,
Somalia, along with Iraq and Afghanistan, has become one of
the most dangerous countries in the world. Getting there
from North America is a forty-five-hour, five-flight voyage
through Frankfurt, Dubai, Djibouti, Bossaso (on the Gulf of
Aden), and, finally, Galkayo. Somalia is a place where a
government has been built out of anarchy. For centuries, stories of pirates have captured imaginations
around the world. The recent bands of daring, ragtag pirates
off the coast of Somalia, hijacking multimillion-dollar
tankers owned by international shipping conglomerates, have
brought the scourge of piracy into the modern era. The capture of the American-crewed cargo ship Maersk Alabama
in April 2009, the first United States ship to be hijacked
in almost two centuries, catapulted the Somali pirates onto
prime-time news. Then, with the horrific killing by Somali
pirates of four Americans, two of whom had built their dream
yacht and were sailing around the world (“And now on to:
Angkor Wat! And Burma!” they had written to friends), the
United States Navy, Special Operation Forces, FBI, Justice
Department, and the world’s military forces were put on
notice: the Somali seas were now the most perilous in the world. Jay Bahadur, a journalist who dared to make his way into the
remote pirate havens of Africa’s easternmost country and
spend months infiltrating their lives, gives us the first
close-up look at the hidden world of the pirates of
war-ravaged Somalia. Bahadur’s riveting narrative exposé—the first ever—looks at
who these men are, how they live, the forces that created
piracy in Somalia, how the pirates spend the ransom money,
how they deal with their hostages. Bahadur makes sense of
the complex and fraught regional politics, the history of
Somalia and the self-governing region of Puntland (an
autonomous region in northeast Somalia), and the various
catastrophic occurrences that have shaped their pirate
destinies. The book looks at how the unrecognized mini-state
of Puntland is dealing with the rise—and increasing
sophistication—of piracy and how, through legal and military
action, other nations, international shippers, the United
Nations, and various international bodies are attempting to
cope with the present danger and growing pirate crisis. A revelation of a world at the epicenter of political and
natural disaster.
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