Hijacked tanker proceeds to Mogadishu, INS Kochi monitors the Malta vessel

Sea Lanes of communications in North Arabian Sea have been disrupted due to missile firing Houthis with Somalian Pirates adding to the mess.

Updated on: Dec 17, 2023, 09:48:54 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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New Delhi: With Iran-backed Shia Houthi militia coming out in support of Hamas terrorists in Gaza and randomly targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Somalian Pirates playing havoc off the Gulf of Aden, major shipping companies are avoiding Bab El-Mandeb chokepoint as a result of which shipping costs and insurance have gone up.

While Houthi militia are targeting commercial shipping in the Red Sea with cruise missiles and missile-firing drones to deter them from proceeding to the Israeli port of Eilat, Somalian pirates have taken control of Malta-flagged MV Ruen and are currently proceeding towards Mogadishu in Somalia. The Indian Navy guided-missile destroyer INS Kochi is in the vicinity of the hijacked ship but the Japanese destroyer JMSDF Akebono has detached itself from the pursuit and has left the vicinity.

It is quite evident that the owners of MV Ruen will have to pay ransom to the Somali pirates to get their ship released from captivity as any armed intervention will lead to loss of lives of the hostage crew. The Somalian pirates boarded MV Ruen around the island of Socotra off the coast of Aden and proceeded towards the Somalian coast. None of the 18 crew has Indian nationality with the injured among them in stable condition. It is understood that Spanish Frigate Victoria had also joined the pursuit to deter the pirates but the status of the ship is not known now.

Although US and NATO warships are trying to protect commercial shipping from Houthi attacks, the Shia rebels at the instigation of Iran have opened a sea front of the coast of Yemen just as another Iranian terror proxy Hezbollah has opened a land front with Israel in South Lebanon. More than one-sixth of global commercial shipping traffic passes through the Red Sea and any disruption like the current one spikes the trade costs.

With Israel in no mood to let the Hamas terrorist group off the hook for the October 7 massacre, it is quite evident that sea lanes of communication in this part of north Arabian Sea will remain disrupted unless pressure is put on Houthi handlers in Tehran to back off. And till such time, the Somalian pirates will make huge amounts of ransom money at the cost of this disruption.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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