Piracy and armed robbery against ships rose worldwide in 2025, with the ICC International Maritime Bureau recording 45 incidents in the first quarter of 2025, an increase of roughly 35 percent over the same period of 2024, per the Bureau's quarterly reporting. In waters around the Arabian Peninsula, the year was marked by the hijacking of dhows and fishing vessels off Somalia and the Gulf of Aden for use as platforms to approach larger ships, per IMB reporting and regional security notices.
Where did hijackings occur in 2025?
The IMB recorded two fishing vessels and two dhows hijacked in 2025 in the greater Somali basin and Gulf of Aden region, per its reporting, alongside attempted boardings and vessels fired upon. In March 2025, a Yemeni-flagged fishing dhow was boarded and held by suspected Somali pirates, per regional incident reporting, and other cases involved fishing vessels towing multiple skiffs operating as pirate mother platforms. The pattern echoed the Somali piracy model of the 2000s: a hijacked dhow becomes a mothership from which skiffs launch against passing dhows and, occasionally, merchant ships.
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What is the response at sea?
The 47-nation Combined Maritime Forces, headquartered in Bahrain, continued counter-piracy and maritime security patrols across roughly 3.2 million square miles of international waters through 2025, per the organization's May 2025 statements, and escort-providing navies maintained convoy coordination along the Gulf of Aden's Maritime Security Transit Corridor. Shipping advisories throughout 2025 urged masters to maintain heightened vigilance, harden superstructures, and report suspicious skiff approaches to UKMTO and the IMB reporting center. As of the end of 2025, no large merchant ship had been hijacked in the region that year, but the dhow hijackings kept the underlying capability for piracy active along the Somali coast.
What does the incident pattern mean for merchant crews?
The 2025 advisories concentrated on behavior rather than hardware: report suspicious approaches to the UKMTO reporting point, maintain an elevated lookout at night in the designated high-risk areas, and keep water hoses, citadels, and barrier measures ready, per IMB and regional guidance carried through the year. Most of the 2025 incidents in the region involved small craft approaching dhows and fishing vessels rather than attacks on large merchant hulls, per IMB reporting, but the hijacking of a mothership in March 2025 demonstrated the reach such a platform provides. Crews transiting the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea were therefore advised to treat unlit skiff clusters and unusual loitering as reportable events, the same practice that defined counter-piracy watchkeeping during the earlier Somali piracy cycle.