Who Are the Pirates? Can They Be Stopped?

Today's pirates are mainly fighters for Somalia's many warlord factions, who have fought each other for control of the country since the collapse of the Siad Barre government in 1991.

This photo released by the U.S. Navy shows pirates holding hostages aboard a hijacked Chinese...

This photo released by the U.S. Navy shows pirates holding hostages aboard a hijacked Chinese fishing vessel, FV Tian Yu 8 in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia, Monday, Nov. 17, 2008. The ship was attacked Nov. 16 and forced to proceed to an anchorage off the Somali coast.

(U.S. Navy, Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky/AP )
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Their motives? A mixture of entrepreneurialism and survival, says Iqbal Jhazbhay, a Somali expert at the University of South Africa in Tshwane, as Pretoria is now called.

"From the evidence so far, these primarily appear to be fighters looking for predatory opportunities," says Jhazbhay. They operated "roadblocks in the past, which were fleecing people as a form of taxation. Now they've seen the opportunities on the high seas."

Initially, one of the main motives for taking to the seas -- working first with local fishermen, and later buying boats and weapons with the proceeds of every ship they captured -- was "pure survival," says Jhazbhay, explaining that armed extortion is one of the few opportunities to make a living in lawless Somalia.

"It's spiked more recently because of a spike in food prices," he says.

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Now it has become a highly profitable, sophisticated criminal enterprise hauling in millions of dollars in ransom payments.

Whom Do They Work For?

The pirates mainly work for themselves.

Much of the piracy seems to be based out of the Puntland, a semiautonomous region on the northern shore of Somalia that broke away from Somalia soon after 1991.

Thousands of pirates now operate off Somalia's coast, although there are no accurate numbers on precisely how many there are.

United Nations monitoring reports on arms smuggling in the Horn of Africa have pointed to evidence that pirate gangs have established relations with corrupt officials of the Puntland government. They bribe port officials to allow the pirates to use Eyl and other ports as their bases of operation, and to bring some of their captured ships in for safekeeping while the pirates negotiate ransoms with the ships' owners.

There is also evidence that expatriate Somalis living in Kenya, Saudi Arabia and throughout the Persian Gulf may be feeding information to the pirates about ships that have docked in those regions and may be heading toward the Gulf of Aden and other pirate-infested areas.