Felix the Cat
09-19-2008, 09:50 PM
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080915.wpiratesweb0915/BNStory/Front/home
ABOARD THE HMCS IROQUOIS, MANAMA, BAHRAIN — Brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, the speedboat full of heavily armed pirates pulled alongside a defenceless Italian merchant ship. As they prepared to board the vessel, intending to seize whatever riches they found aboard, the Italian captain sent out a distress call and a gunboat flying the colours of Her Majesty's navy came steaming to his aid, forcing the pirates to flee.
The dramatic rescue-at-sea isn't something from the history books or the plot of an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster. It happened last week off the coast of lawless Somalia, where incidents of old-fashioned piracy are commonplace again. The ship that steamed to the Italian captain's assistance was a Canadian destroyer, HMCS Iroquois.
It was a semi-routine day for those who, until Monday, were serving in Canada's second-largest military deployment abroad after Afghanistan: A thousand sailors aboard three warships looking for trouble in some of the wildest waters anywhere.
The three ships – the Iroquois, along with HMCS Calgary, a frigate, and HMCS Protecteur, a supply and refuelling ship – spent the past three-and-a-half months serving in a multinational force known as Combined Task Force 150, with the Iroquois serving as the flagship of what is usually a 15-ship group. Their mandate stretched from the tense waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where coalition warships were often in close quarters with the Iranian navy, to the Egypt's Suez Canal.
With a surge of naval hijackings and hostage takings off the Somali coast posing a threat to commercial traffic through the Gulf of Aden, the Iroquois and CTF-150 spent much of their time hunting elusive pirates. The International Maritime Bureau has documented 49 incidents of piracy in the gulf so far in 2008, compared with 34 for all of last year.
Many of those have occurred in the past month, including the Sept. 3 kidnapping of a French couple aboard a 50-foot luxury yacht; their captors are demanding a $1.4-million ransom. Last week, a South Korean cargo ship was seized in the Gulf of Aden, along with all 21 of its crew, on the same day that another pirate crew fired machine-gun rounds at a Greek vessel in the area.
Commodore Bob Davidson, who finished his tour as commander of CTF-150 on Monday, said the rise of piracy in Somali waters was a reflection of the instability inside that country, which has been mired for decades in destitution and civil war. He characterized most of the pirates as “desperate people” who had fallen in with organized-crime.
The more success the pirates have had in attacking traffic in the Gulf of Aden, the more brazen they become, and the more Somalis they've been able to draw into their ranks.
“There has been an increase [in pirate attacks]. What is driving it now is the realization that there's money to be made here. So the pirates have upgraded their capacity,” Commodore Davidson said in an interview aboard the Iroquois shortly after a ceremony in which Canada formally handed over leadership of CTF-150 to Denmark.
“You're looking at an area where there's lots of fighters, there's lots of weapons.” These aren't the romanticized pirates of lore who sailed the high seas under the skull-and-crossbones flag. Most of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden, Commodore Davidson said, were carried out by small groups of men who use small, fast vessels to pull alongside larger ships and then force their way aboard with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Such small craft are hard for the coalition ships to spot, and even harder for them to stop. On a dozen or so occasions that Commodore Davidson said his ships came across a pirate attack in progress, the marauders quickly fled before the coalition forces could apprehend them.
“There's nothing quite like the arrival of a grey hull and all the firepower that goes with it to cause these guys to scatter,” Commodore Davidson said with a tight-lipped grin.
While unabashedly proud of the work his sailors had done under his command – including the boarding of 190 suspicious vessels, some inside Somali coastal waters – Commodore Davidson admits that 15 ships can do little to halt piracy in an area as large as the Gulf of Aden, with annual traffic of 20,000 ships, especially when CTF-150 had other tasks as well. He said the flotilla's main goal was just to make its presence felt in those otherwise lawless waters.
The incoming Danish commander of the CTF-150 seemed slightly intimidated by the task he had just agreed to take on. In addition to Canada and Denmark, the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Pakistan contribute ships to CTF-150.
“This problem cannot be solved by military presence at sea; … at some stage there needs to be solutions ashore, otherwise it's just too easy for pirates to operate from their bases on shore. It doesn't matter how many [war]ships we pull into an area, they will still be able to hijack ships if they can operate safely from a base in the area,” Commodore Per Christensen said.
Just how 1,000 Canadian sailors ended up hunting for pirates off the coast of Somalia is a complicated story. Some might call it mission drift: CTF-150 was initially created under Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. military response against al-Qaeda and the Taliban after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
As U.S.-led forces prepared to invade Afghanistan, a coalition armada assembled in the Arabian Sea. Six Canadian warships, including the hulking, 36-year-old Iroquois, sped to the region.
Over the intervening seven years, the mission shifted from supporting the Afghanistan war to aiding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. More recently, the force – which is under the regional command of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain – has taken on the broader, less tangible task of providing security and stability across an area that's more than six million square kilometres in size. Inexorably, CTF-150, which was created to fight terrorists, found itself chasing pirates.
Commodore Davidson, for one, doesn't see anything strange about how the mission has evolved. A submariner by trade, he compared the anti-piracy effort to eliminating background noise so that they could focus on what the real enemy, which he said is still al-Qaeda, is up to.
“Operation Enduring Freedom started as counter-terrorism. But looking for terrorists in a maritime environment is a major challenge,” he said. “There's a lot of illicit activity, smuggling, … then buried inside all of that are the nasty people, the terrorists, who are trying to do harm to others. So, Operation Enduring Freedom, although principally targeted at that bottom layer of terrorists, has to deal with some of the other layers, just to simplify the environment so you can find what you're looking for.”
The Canadian and coalition ships actually saw far more of the Iranian navy than they did suspected pirates. Despite rising international tensions and tit-for-tat threats over Iran's nuclear program, Commodore Davidson said his dealings with the Iranians were always “very professional and very courteous.”
After more than three months at sea, the Iroquois, Calgary and Protecteur begin the journey home on Tuesday after a wary last lap through the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal. A fourth Canadian warship, the frigate HMCS Ville de Quebec, will remain in the region providing protection to World Food Program ships delivering food aid into Somalia.
ABOARD THE HMCS IROQUOIS, MANAMA, BAHRAIN — Brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, the speedboat full of heavily armed pirates pulled alongside a defenceless Italian merchant ship. As they prepared to board the vessel, intending to seize whatever riches they found aboard, the Italian captain sent out a distress call and a gunboat flying the colours of Her Majesty's navy came steaming to his aid, forcing the pirates to flee.
The dramatic rescue-at-sea isn't something from the history books or the plot of an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster. It happened last week off the coast of lawless Somalia, where incidents of old-fashioned piracy are commonplace again. The ship that steamed to the Italian captain's assistance was a Canadian destroyer, HMCS Iroquois.
It was a semi-routine day for those who, until Monday, were serving in Canada's second-largest military deployment abroad after Afghanistan: A thousand sailors aboard three warships looking for trouble in some of the wildest waters anywhere.
The three ships – the Iroquois, along with HMCS Calgary, a frigate, and HMCS Protecteur, a supply and refuelling ship – spent the past three-and-a-half months serving in a multinational force known as Combined Task Force 150, with the Iroquois serving as the flagship of what is usually a 15-ship group. Their mandate stretched from the tense waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where coalition warships were often in close quarters with the Iranian navy, to the Egypt's Suez Canal.
With a surge of naval hijackings and hostage takings off the Somali coast posing a threat to commercial traffic through the Gulf of Aden, the Iroquois and CTF-150 spent much of their time hunting elusive pirates. The International Maritime Bureau has documented 49 incidents of piracy in the gulf so far in 2008, compared with 34 for all of last year.
Many of those have occurred in the past month, including the Sept. 3 kidnapping of a French couple aboard a 50-foot luxury yacht; their captors are demanding a $1.4-million ransom. Last week, a South Korean cargo ship was seized in the Gulf of Aden, along with all 21 of its crew, on the same day that another pirate crew fired machine-gun rounds at a Greek vessel in the area.
Commodore Bob Davidson, who finished his tour as commander of CTF-150 on Monday, said the rise of piracy in Somali waters was a reflection of the instability inside that country, which has been mired for decades in destitution and civil war. He characterized most of the pirates as “desperate people” who had fallen in with organized-crime.
The more success the pirates have had in attacking traffic in the Gulf of Aden, the more brazen they become, and the more Somalis they've been able to draw into their ranks.
“There has been an increase [in pirate attacks]. What is driving it now is the realization that there's money to be made here. So the pirates have upgraded their capacity,” Commodore Davidson said in an interview aboard the Iroquois shortly after a ceremony in which Canada formally handed over leadership of CTF-150 to Denmark.
“You're looking at an area where there's lots of fighters, there's lots of weapons.” These aren't the romanticized pirates of lore who sailed the high seas under the skull-and-crossbones flag. Most of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden, Commodore Davidson said, were carried out by small groups of men who use small, fast vessels to pull alongside larger ships and then force their way aboard with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Such small craft are hard for the coalition ships to spot, and even harder for them to stop. On a dozen or so occasions that Commodore Davidson said his ships came across a pirate attack in progress, the marauders quickly fled before the coalition forces could apprehend them.
“There's nothing quite like the arrival of a grey hull and all the firepower that goes with it to cause these guys to scatter,” Commodore Davidson said with a tight-lipped grin.
While unabashedly proud of the work his sailors had done under his command – including the boarding of 190 suspicious vessels, some inside Somali coastal waters – Commodore Davidson admits that 15 ships can do little to halt piracy in an area as large as the Gulf of Aden, with annual traffic of 20,000 ships, especially when CTF-150 had other tasks as well. He said the flotilla's main goal was just to make its presence felt in those otherwise lawless waters.
The incoming Danish commander of the CTF-150 seemed slightly intimidated by the task he had just agreed to take on. In addition to Canada and Denmark, the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Pakistan contribute ships to CTF-150.
“This problem cannot be solved by military presence at sea; … at some stage there needs to be solutions ashore, otherwise it's just too easy for pirates to operate from their bases on shore. It doesn't matter how many [war]ships we pull into an area, they will still be able to hijack ships if they can operate safely from a base in the area,” Commodore Per Christensen said.
Just how 1,000 Canadian sailors ended up hunting for pirates off the coast of Somalia is a complicated story. Some might call it mission drift: CTF-150 was initially created under Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. military response against al-Qaeda and the Taliban after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
As U.S.-led forces prepared to invade Afghanistan, a coalition armada assembled in the Arabian Sea. Six Canadian warships, including the hulking, 36-year-old Iroquois, sped to the region.
Over the intervening seven years, the mission shifted from supporting the Afghanistan war to aiding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. More recently, the force – which is under the regional command of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain – has taken on the broader, less tangible task of providing security and stability across an area that's more than six million square kilometres in size. Inexorably, CTF-150, which was created to fight terrorists, found itself chasing pirates.
Commodore Davidson, for one, doesn't see anything strange about how the mission has evolved. A submariner by trade, he compared the anti-piracy effort to eliminating background noise so that they could focus on what the real enemy, which he said is still al-Qaeda, is up to.
“Operation Enduring Freedom started as counter-terrorism. But looking for terrorists in a maritime environment is a major challenge,” he said. “There's a lot of illicit activity, smuggling, … then buried inside all of that are the nasty people, the terrorists, who are trying to do harm to others. So, Operation Enduring Freedom, although principally targeted at that bottom layer of terrorists, has to deal with some of the other layers, just to simplify the environment so you can find what you're looking for.”
The Canadian and coalition ships actually saw far more of the Iranian navy than they did suspected pirates. Despite rising international tensions and tit-for-tat threats over Iran's nuclear program, Commodore Davidson said his dealings with the Iranians were always “very professional and very courteous.”
After more than three months at sea, the Iroquois, Calgary and Protecteur begin the journey home on Tuesday after a wary last lap through the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal. A fourth Canadian warship, the frigate HMCS Ville de Quebec, will remain in the region providing protection to World Food Program ships delivering food aid into Somalia.