Pirates jumping on board civil war

THEY are meant to be international pariahs but Ismail Haji Noor, a local government official, recently arrived in a notorious pirate den with a simple message: we need your assistance.

With the Shabab militant group sweeping across Somalia and the US-backed central government teetering on life support, Noor stood on a beach flanked by dozens of pirate gunmen, two hijacked ships over his shoulder, and announced: "From now on we'll be working together."

He hugged several pirate bosses and called them "brother" and later explained that while he saw the pirates as criminals and eventually wanted to rehabilitate them, right now the Shabab were a much graver threat. "Squished between the two, we have to become friends with the pirates," Noor said. "Actually, this is a great opportunity."

For years, Somalia's pirate gangs seemed content to rob and hijack on the high seas and not get sucked into the messy civil war on land. Now that may be changing and the pirates are taking sides - both sides. While local government officials in Hobyo have deputised pirate gangs to ring off coastal villages and block out the Shabab, down the beach in Xarardheere, another pirate lair, elders said that other pirates recently agreed to split their ransoms with the Shabab and Hizbul Islam, another Islamist insurgent group.

The militant Islamists had originally vowed to shut down piracy in Xarardheere, claiming it was unholy, but apparently the money was too good. This seems to be the start of the West's worst Somali nightmare, with two of the country's biggest growth industries - piracy and Islamist radicalism - joining hands.

"You can't ignore the pirates any more," said Mohamed Aden, a clan leader in central Somalia. "They're getting more and more muscle. They used to invest their money in just boats and going out to sea but now they're building up their military side."

Take the elusive and powerful pirate boss Mohamed Garfanji, who surfaced briefly two weeks ago wearing a belt of bullets strapped across his chest and a purple rain jacket to guide a group of foreign journalists to Hobyo, his base. The journalists had been invited by the Galmudug State administration, a clan-based local government trying to gain a foothold in the region. But Hobyo is a fully-engulfed piracy community, where ten-year-old boys with Kalashnikovs hang out in the sandy streets and glare at outsiders, and the visit could happen only with Garfanji's blessing. During a meeting with Hobyo elders, Garfanji stuck his head through the door and grunted: "It's OK for you guys to speak to the journalists.And for them to take pictures."

Garfanji is believed to have hijacked a half-dozen ships and used millions of dollars in ransom money to build a infantry division of several hundred men, 80 heavy machine guns and a half a dozen trucks with anti-aircraft guns. Garfanji's original motivation was probably to protect his profits, but now his associates claim that their army was created to stop Hizbul Islam and the Shabab.

Somalia's violence has been grinding on since 1991, when the central government collapsed, but it keeps morphing in subtle but potentially significant ways.

Just last year, elders in several coastal areas were turning against pirates because of their un-Islamic ways. Now, with the security situation deteriorating so rapidly, they seem to ask fewer questions, especially about where their young men get their guns.

In places like Hobyo, a poor, isolated village on a crescent of white sand, the biggest fear is the Shabab, the most fearsome group in Somalia, whose insurgents have pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Last month they showed how effective and brutal they can be, gunning down more than 30 people in a hotel in the government zone in the capital Mogadishu.

Once the Shabab take over an area, they impose a harsh form of Islamic law, banning music, soccer, even bras. Offenders can get their hands chopped off or their heads bashed in with rocks.

Many areas of Somalia have given up on the central government's saving them from the Shabab, which is why local administrations are gaining traction.

Noor said he needed the pirate muscle to protect his area because "we just don't have the forces".

Though 2010 is shaping up as another difficult year - more than 30 ships have been hijacked, which means tens of millions of dollars in ransom - the increased naval presence off Somalia's coast has taken its toll, with hundreds of pirates now in jail and even more lost at sea, presumed drowned.