Warships ply African coast in hunt for pirates

Brandishing Kalashnikov assault rifles, the boat full of heavily armed pirates pulled alongside a defenseless Italian merchant ship. As they prepared to board the vessel, intending to seize whatever riches they found aboard, the Italian captain sent out a distress call and a gunboat flying the colors of Canada's navy came steaming to his aid, forcing the pirates to flee.

The dramatic rescue-at-sea isn't something from the history books or the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster. It happened last week off the coast of lawless Somalia, where incidents of old-fashioned piracy are commonplace again. The ship that steamed to the Italian captain's assistance was a Canadian destroyer, HMCS Iroquois.

"There's nothing quite like the arrival of a grey hull and all the firepower that goes with it to cause these guys to scatter," Commodore Bob Davidson said with a tight-lipped grin.

It was a semi-routine day for those who, until this week, were serving in Canada's second-largest military deployment abroad after Afghanistan: 1,000 sailors aboard three warships looking for trouble in some of the wildest waters anywhere.

The three ships -- the Iroquois, along with HMCS Calgary, a frigate, and HMCS Protecteur, a supply and refueling ship -- spent the past 3 1/2 months serving in a multinational force known as Combined Task Force 150, with the Iroquois serving as the flagship of what is usually a 15-ship group. Their mandate stretched from the tense waters of the Strait of Hormuz, where coalition warships were often in close quarters with the Iranian navy, to the Egypt's Suez Canal.

With a surge of naval hijackings and hostage takings off the Somali coast posing a threat to commercial traffic through the Gulf of Aden, the Iroquois and CTF-150 spent much of their time hunting elusive pirates. The International Maritime Bureau has documented 49 incidents of piracy in the gulf so far in 2008, compared with 34 for all of last year.

Most of the pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden were carried out by groups of men who use small, fast vessels to pull alongside larger ships and then force their way aboard with automatic rifles and grenade launchers, Davidson said.

Such small craft are hard for the coalition ships to spot, and even harder for them to stop. On a dozen or so occasions that Davidson said his ships came across a pirate attack in progress, the marauders quickly fled before the coalition forces could apprehend them.

While unabashedly proud of the work his sailors had done under his command -- including the boarding of 190 suspicious vessels, some inside Somali coastal waters -- Davidson admits that 15 ships can do little to halt piracy among the 20,000 ships that annually travel in the Gulf of Aden, especially when CTF-150 had other tasks as well.The incoming Danish commander of the CTF-150 seemed slightly intimidated by the task he had just agreed to take on. In addition to Canada and Denmark, the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Pakistan contribute ships to CTF-150.

"At some stage there needs to be solutions ashore, otherwise it's just too easy for pirates to operate from their bases on shore," Commodore Per Christensen said.

After more than three months at sea, the Iroquois, Calgary and Protecteur began the journey back to Canada this week after a wary last lap through the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)