Center for a New American Security

Get some! It would have cooler had they sunk the mother ship. Or at least told France where they could sink it. Those French, man, hate themselves some pirates.

MOGADISHU, Somalia (Reuters) — Dutch commandos freed 20 Yemeni hostages on Saturday and briefly detained seven pirates who had forced the Yemenis to join them in attacking vessels in the Gulf of Aden, NATO officials said.

The Dutch forces, operating under a NATO antipiracy mission, then released the pirates, a NATO commander said, because NATO has no “detainment policy.”

Meanwhile, gunmen from Somalia seized a Belgian-registered ship and its 10 crew members farther south in the Indian Ocean. A pirate spokesman said the vessel, the Pompei, would be taken to the coast.

Somali sea gangs have captured dozens of ships, taken hundreds of sailors prisoner and made off with millions of dollars in ransoms despite the presence of foreign warships in waters off the Horn of Africa.

Lt. Cmdr. Alexandre Fernandes of NATO said the 20 Yemeni fishermen were rescued after a Dutch Navy frigate on a NATO patrol responded to an assault on a Greek-owned tanker. The tanker had been attacked by pirates firing assault rifles and grenades.

Commandos from the Dutch ship chased the pirates, who were on a small skiff, back to their mother ship, a hijacked Yemeni fishing dhow.

“We have freed the hostages, we have freed the dhow and we have seized the weapons,” Commander Fernandes said, speaking on board the Portuguese warship Corte-Real. “The pirates did not fight, and no gunfire was exchanged.” The Corte-Real is also on a NATO antipiracy mission.

So says Maj. R. J. Martopawiro of the Surinamese Army. Abu Muqawama pays attention to the Dutch Army, though, because a) they're fighting hard in Afghanistan and b) the political debates they have within the Netherlands on the war in Afghanistan and whether or not it's appropriate to be there mirror, in many ways, the debates held in other NATO countries. This article on how the Dutch Army navigates their colonial legacy is fascinating, though Abu Muqawama wishes they had included a bit more about the jungle warfare school.

“Some 70 percent of the world’s conflicts in the last 30 years have occurred in jungle areas,” said Maj. Eric Piwek, 34, who brought the 31st Infantry Company of the Dutch Marines here from its base in the Netherlands Antilles. “Thus, we must be prepared to go into these unfortunate places to help sort things out.”

Toughening up the Dutch military for missions abroad became a priority after Dutch troops serving with the United Nations in Srebrenica were widely vilified for failing to prevent Serbs from massacring about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in 1995.

The Dutch government has since sent troops to Afghanistan, Ethiopia and Liberia. In May, the Netherlands is expected to send about 60 service members to eastern Chad and the Central African Republic as part of a European Union mission to provide security for camps of Sudanese refugees.

About once a month, Abu Muqawama will sift through all the mail his readers send to the abumuqawama[at]hotmail.com email address. A few things of note, worth passing along:

Hannah sent the html address to the Visitor's Guide to Baghdad's Green Zone. Abu Muqawama had read this before after someone sent the word document his way over email, and funnily enough, one of the authors is a guy Abu Muqawama met many years ago at Fort Lewis.

Michael, meanwhile, has been reading Kaboom, a blog written by a young lieutenant in Iraq. Abu Muqawama is, generally, in favor of letting smart young soldiers tell the world their stories. Nine times out of ten, they show the U.S. military and its soldiers in a much more favorable and human light than the world is used to.

Elsewhere, "The Bateman" has finally had enough and unloads both barrels in the direction of the New York Times regarding their "crazy veterans" series of articles.

And finally, a big thanks goes out to Péter Marton for getting in touch with the blogging crew here at Abu Muqawama. Péter runs the excellent [My] State Failure Blog and passed along his most recent paper, written with Péter Wagner, on Dutch and Hungarian counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan. (Abu Muqawama blogged on this paper earlier this week.) Abu Muqawama had actually already seen the paper via afghanistanica before he noticed Péter sent a copy to the email account. Péter has now taken it upon himself to educate Abu Muqawama on European counterinsurgency training, most recently passing along an article that can be found here on Dutch pre-deployment training. Fascinating. Thanks, Péter!