YemenOnline-July 11,2008- It may be hard to tell one pirate attack from another, but a six-month accounting has brought a trend into sharp relief.

Today, the International Maritime Bureau expressed alarm over sea crime off the coast of Somalia — a familiar call in recent years. However, the agency also noted that the location of the attacks had shifted northward along its 1,880 mile coast, the longest in Africa.

“Of the 24 Somali incidents, 19 occurred in the Gulf of Aden,” the report said. Pirates are leaving behind the northeastern coastline, the site of a majority of attacks in recent years, though they are not straying out of Somali waters. “All incidents in the Gulf of Aden have taken place on the eastern side of the Gulf and are attributed to Somali pirates.”

They are keeping up their nasty habits as well, according to the I.M.B.’s most recent weekly bulletin:

These pirates are firing automatic weapons and Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPG) in an attempt to board and hijack vessels. Once the attack is successful and the vessel hijacked, the pirates sail towards the Somali coast and thereafter demand a ransom for the release of the vessel and crew.

Pirates thrive in lawless areas such as Somalia. But Yemen, the country on the other side of the gulf, has also been struggling with instability. A writer for Arab Reform Bulletin summarized recent events:

Over the past six months, the tone in international media coverage of Yemen has become increasingly apocalyptic. On the security front, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Yemen has been well documented via a spate of brazen attacks, leading security experts to warn that the new generation of Yemeni militants will be more lethal than its predecessors. The failed state narrative, in which Yemen devolves into something resembling Somalia or Afghanistan, has also spread. Yemeni ministers, foreign aid workers, and journalists routinely predict an imminent demise, as food prices skyrocket, drought hurts harvests, the long-running al-Houthi rebellion in the north drags on, and riots erupt in the south over unresolved grievances stemming from the 1990 reunification of the country.

In linking to that article earlier this week, Foreign Policy magazine asked whether Yemen was turning into the next failed state, a development that would have dire implications for one of the world’s most important waterways. As it stands, an affiliate of Lloyd’s of London told Bloomberg News that the Gulf of Aden had “an equivalent insurance risk to places such as Iraq.”

 By Mike Nizza

NY Times