Surveillance

Mogadishu, Somalia – The fishing town of Bander Beyla, on Somalia’s Puntland coast, has become a focal point of the renewed piracy crisis. But beyond the hijackings and international security operations, residents are struggling to protect their livelihoods as fishing restrictions, arrests and surveillance reshape daily life.

Abdifatah Mohamed has spent 20 years fishing off Somalia’s coast. He began at 15, but says declining catches and foreign trawlers have made it increasingly difficult to support his family.

“I don’t catch as much fish anymore, and the prospects for catching lobsters have become rare,” the 35-year-old said.

“Foreign trawlers are emptying out the seas,” he added.

Somalia’s central government collapsed in 1991, weakening maritime oversight and leaving its waters vulnerable to illegal fishing. Some fishermen, angered by foreign vessels exploiting the country’s resources, have turned to piracy.

“We’re [fishermen] no match for the foreign trawlers, who possess capabilities far greater than us, which impacts the livelihoods of our families on land,” Mohamed said.

He added, “Some from our community have taken up arms at sea, but deep down I know it’s hurting our community.”

Piracy has surged off Somalia since late April 2026. The reported number of hijackings varies according to whether counts include commercial ships, fishing vessels and dhows. Several seized vessels have been held near Bander Beyla, bringing the crisis close to the town’s fishing community.

In late August, local authorities restricted fishermen from going to sea amid concerns that pirates were disguising themselves as fishermen.

“The local authorities gave an order the last week of August preventing us from going out at sea, which would remain in effect for two months,” Mohamed said.

“Our families depend on what we catch at sea. Even though our catches [of fish] have gone down in recent years, it helped provide for our families at home. But it’s like we were being punished for crimes we have nothing to do with, and our families have suffered for it.”

For fishermen, Mohamed said, going to sea has become a risk whether they obey the restrictions or defy them.

“It’s a two-way risk, because if the authorities know you went out to sea, they could accuse you of piracy or even transporting supplies to the ships that were hijacked,” he noted.

“While out at sea, you could face arrest or violence from international navies, and get mistaken for pirates, and taken away to a jail in a foreign land. It’s happened to a lot of men from this town.”

Abdirizak Said, who has fished in Bander Beyla for 15 years, said the crackdown has deepened the hardship faced by residents.

“Dozens have been arrested, most of them after they brought food or khat to the pirates, when the ships were anchored near Bander Bayla,” he said.

“Businesses and stores were even ordered by the [local] government not to sell anything to pirates, and if they do, they’ll be viewed as pirates themselves.”

The networks behind piracy

Some of the people involved in the hijackings come from the same town now bearing the consequences.

“Some of the pirates involved in the hijackings are from Bander Bayla and hail from this community,” Said added.

Jethro Norman, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), said that piracy cannot be understood solely as a criminal activity at sea. It also depends on networks on land that can provide money, equipment, manpower and protection.

“Kinship networks can effectively function as a form of financial and social infrastructure, and for piracy, this is no different,” he said. “Pirate groups have historically been able to mobilise credit, and get equipment, manpower and protection.”

“In other words, clan relationships can underwrite the practical resources and act of mobilising that make piracy possible. This is precisely why effective counter piracy requires understanding the land-based networks that make those operations possible,” Norman added.

These networks also help explain why efforts to disrupt piracy reach into ordinary commercial life. Said noted that the consequences extend beyond fishing: boats carrying supplies from Yemen to Somalia have stopped arriving, for instance.

“The boats that used to bring supplies from Yemen have also ceased, because of these [pirate] attacks,” he said.

Residents push back

Despite the disruption, Mohamed said that some residents have tried to prevent young men from joining the attacks.

“Recently there was an attempt by local youth with guns trying to go out at sea, but the residents told them not to do it and that they would be harming their community even more,” Mohamed said.

“It was civilians that took the initiative to stop them and not the government because it’s the civilians in this town that will suffer the blowback if they launch attacks from here,” he added.

Two local government officials, speaking anonymously because they were not authorised to talk to the press, confirmed that restrictions had been imposed to weaken the local support networks supplying pirates.

“The security restrictions were lifted on October 1 after successful anti-piracy operations led to the release of three ships,” the first local official said.

The International Maritime Organization confirmed on October 2 that three hijacked vessels, Honour 25, Seamull (also known as Sibu 1) and Eureka, had been freed. It said 44 seafarers were released and reported that five crew members died during the rescue operation involving Honour 25.

The lifting of restrictions has not ended the visible security presence around Bander Beyla, according to the officials.

“Military helicopters flying inland from the sea routinely hover over the town, and these flyovers are more frequent in the nearby remote coastal areas,” one local government official added.

“They’re looking for any movements of armed individuals on the coast,” a second local government official said.

Both officials said the helicopters belonged to the European Union Naval Force, which has conducted counter-piracy operations in the region for years.

Security forces stretched thin

The renewed attacks have emerged amid wider regional instability and competing demands on maritime security forces. Abdinur Abdella, a Somali political and security analyst, said international naval attention shifted after Houthi attacks began in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in late 2023.

“When Houthis began carrying out attacks in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in late 2023 in response to the conflict in Gaza, it saw international navies change their focus and efforts to the Houthi threat, which allowed armed groups active on the Somali coast to take advantage of the lax in security,” Abdella said.

Norman said Puntland’s maritime forces have also been diverted by other security challenges.

“The PMPF [Puntland Maritime Police Force] has been stretched thin by its fight against ISIS in the Al-Miskad mountains. It also lost some personnel to the 2023 anti-Somaliland rebellion in Las Anod,” he told Al Jazeera. “Some Dhulbahante fighters from Puntland’s forces, including the PMPF, joined the uprising, which wrested roughly a third of Somaliland’s claimed territory from its control.”

“Again, this links back to the clan dimension, and the strength of kinship ties and obligations as essential to understanding contemporary piracy networks and counter piracy initiatives,” Norman added.

For residents of Bander Beyla, these overlapping security pressures are not abstract geopolitical developments. They determine whether fishermen can work, whether supplies arrive and whether people risk being mistaken for pirates.

Said noted that the presence of aircraft remains a reminder that even after restrictions were lifted, fishermen are still being watched.

“We can hear the sound of aircraft and the louder it gets, the closer they are, so we know they’re watching,” he said. “I just want to make a living without worrying whether I’ll make it back to shore safely.”

Rabat, Morocco – “I was surveilled not because of a specific article. I was investigating land dispossession in Morocco. I then learned I was a Pegasus target,” Omar Radi, a journalist and human rights defender, told Al Jazeera, referring to the mobile surveillance tool developed by Israeli company NSO Group.

The findings emerged in June 2020, when Amnesty International Security Lab examined his phone. Radi, now based in Germany, said he had spent two years, from 2018 to 2020, noticing signs including his phone’s battery draining quickly, its temperature rising and the network slowing down.

The physical surveillance, he said, was barely discreet.

“They came every day to get a daily report from the parking attendants in my street, the shops I used to go to, and my friends,” he said. “I would sometimes turn around and walk towards the people following me to take photographs, but they ran quickly and hid their faces.”

His case is among four detailed in a new Amnesty International report, We Start With the Verdict: Inside Morocco’s Surveillance Machine, produced with 14 media organisations and coordinated by the international network of journalists Forbidden Stories.

The other three are Fouad Abdelmoumni, a veteran activist; Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, a human rights lawyer; and Hicham Mansouri, a journalist in exile who had been imprisoned in 2015 on charges of adultery and sexual exploitation, which Amnesty describes as trumped-up.

The report draws on interviews with a whistleblower using the pseudonym Safir, a former employee of Morocco’s General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST). Amnesty said it corroborated key parts of Safir’s testimony with independent sources, technical evidence and interviews with 10 people identified as surveillance targets, including Radi.

“The Amnesty report connected many dots as to what I was living and feeling while I was under tight surveillance,” Radi said.

“It explains the extraordinary aspect of my police interrogations and my trial, where many of my rights weren’t respected, because even the judicial police and the judges were under monitoring,” he added.

Amnesty identifies the DGST as the agency behind the deployment of Pegasus spyware in Morocco and documents what it describes as abuses of the spyware against activists and journalists between 2017 and 2021.

Morocco denies surveillance

Morocco has previously rejected Amnesty’s allegations that its authorities used Pegasus to target journalists, activists and other critics.

In statements issued in 2020 and 2022, Moroccan authorities challenged Amnesty to provide material evidence supporting its claims.

Amnesty said it wrote to Moroccan authorities four weeks before publishing its latest report and invited them to respond, but received no response.

Al Jazeera also sought comment from Moroccan officials but had not received a response at the time of publication.

Moroccan media have also challenged the latest report. Le360 cited arguments that the presence of a phone number in Pegasus targeting records does not, by itself, prove that a device was infected or establish who ordered an alleged attack.

The outlet also argued that Amnesty had not provided the conclusive technical and material evidence Moroccan authorities had demanded.

The report says Morocco’s Pegasus operations were fully active by October 2017, pointing to the case of human rights lawyer El Bouchattaoui, whose number was entered into the system in September 2017 and selected for targeting weeks before he received an infection link by text message.

Amnesty said its analysis of Pegasus records matched 103 Moroccan phone numbers to individuals identified as potential targets between September and December 2017. Of those, 65 were identifiable as civil society members, including 34 human rights defenders, 22 journalists and media workers, five lawyers and four academics.

According to Amnesty, Safir described a surveillance apparatus that combined digital and physical methods. Targeted individuals were secretly filmed and recorded in detention, offices, cars, cafes and even bedrooms, he said.

Phone shops, he added, were coopted to sell targets devices infected with spyware. Neighbours of human rights defenders, he said, were recruited as informants to file daily reports on their movements.

Safir also described the use of remote control systems (RCS) at internet cafes. Field agents would identify which cafe a target was visiting, he said, giving the DGST access to activity on machines it had already infected and allowing an operator to track calls, read messages, access photographs and record audio.

The report says similar tactics were used against activist Abdelmoumni, who was secretly filmed at home with his fiancee in 2021. Abdelmoumni said he believed the footage was captured through a hidden camera in an air-conditioning unit, based on the recording’s angle.

Safir described the episode as a “textbook case” of a DGST surveillance and cleanup operation designed to leave no trace.

Journalists describe pressure and intimidation

Taoufik Bouachrine, one of Morocco’s best-known journalists and host of the Talk on Politics podcast, was not named in Amnesty’s report but described a similar pattern.

“In Morocco, as in all Arab countries, inventive methods are used to silence journalists and deter them from investigative journalism, particularly when it concerns the unlawful exercise of power, financial corruption, and the intertwining of political authority and money,” he told Al Jazeera.

The first method, he said, is fabricating criminal cases against journalists, “often involving allegations of sexual misconduct in a conservative society that amount to a journalist’s moral execution”.

The second, he said, is a smear campaign run through armies of online trolls and operatives who target journalists and their families.

Bouachrine, 57, was arrested in 2018 on charges of rape and human trafficking and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He has denied the charges, saying his prosecution was tied to his journalism.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Bouachrine’s detention arbitrary and said he had been subjected to judicial harassment. The European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for his release, along with other journalists tried on similar charges.

He served more than six years before being released under a royal pardon. By then, Akhbar Al-Youm, the newspaper he founded, had already closed. Bouachrine said authorities had cut off its advertising revenue.

“This is another method of destroying investigative journalism,” he added, “turning off the advertising tap and leaving a newspaper to die slowly.”