Belgian pirate-buster tale
Tiny Belgium, like most Western European countries, may have a token military force when it comes to having to fight off an entire Russian Guards Army, but when it comes to special ops units can punch well above their weigh-class.
The Belgian Special Forces Group traces its lineage to 1942 when Free Belgium forces in the UK trained alongside commando units and established an Independent Parachute Company which later became known as the Belgian SAS Squadron. After the war they expanded and re-branded until 2000 when they officially became the SFG.
You knew THESE guys would go full-on FN
SOFREP has an interesting tale of how Belgium’s SF group quietly went to the Horn of Africa to take care of business.
The Hobyo-Harardhere Pirate Network was probably the most notorious pirate gang in Somalia in 2009, and its ring leader was the pirate kingpin known as Afweyneh or “big mouth” whose real name is Mohammed Abdi Hassan. Abdi Hassan became notorious as his men engaged in a spree of ship hijackings that included kidnapping a British couple from their yacht, capturing a Saudi oil tanker, and a Ukrainian flagged ship that turned out to be loaded with 33 T-72 tanks. But the beginning of the end for Abdi Hassan actually came after his gang hijacked a Belgian vessel, the MV Pompei.
When Abdi Hassan’s pirates captured the Pompei in 2009, Belgian Special Forces immediately began planning to conduct a hostage rescue mission to recover the ship’s crew. A 9-man advanced party from the Belgian Special Operations Group traveled to the French air base, Base Aerienne 188, in Djibouti and began preparing for the eventual arrival of a 50-man element to conduct the hostage rescue mission…
It doesn’t end well for Afweyneh