Mohamed Garfanji, Somalia’s top pirate boss, talks sparingly and has the edginess of a wanted man who never lowers his guard and is always planning his next move.

On his first encounter with foreign journalists, his eyes only stop scanning his surroundings when he breaks his silence, speaking with an intense gaze that is both menacing and playful.

Speaking to AFP in the town of Wisil in central Somalia, he thumbs through his mobile phone picture gallery for shots he and his boys took of foreign tuna seiners off the coast of Hobyo, their nearby base.

“See this one? Only a few months ago, 20 miles (32 kilometres) from Hobyo … And this one, a big Spanish ship,” Garfanji says, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

“Now your armies have sent their soldiers so you can continue to take our fish,” he says, clenched fist and gold wrist watch sticking out of the sleeve of a warm dark blue bomber jacket.

His sidekicks nod silently as they devotedly chew their daily bundle of khat, a narcotic leaf widely consumed in Somalia and whose stimulant qualities make it particularly prized by pirates.

These men were behind some of the most spectacular catches in modern piracy — including the 2008 capture of a Ukrainian ship packed with tanks and weapons — and at barely 30, Garfanji now runs a small army.

His is a Robin Hood narrative of Somali piracy as a struggle by dispossessed fishermen against vessels from Europe and Asia violating Somalia’s exclusive economic zone and poaching its abundant tuna under naval protection.

In Hobyo the following morning, one of his top lieutenants, Mohamed, stands on the beach, clutching his machine gun behind his neck like a balancing pole, ammunition belts snaking down from his shoulders.

The sand-charged wind blows his black-and-white checkered keffieh and cigarette smoke into his face as he squints at the imposing figure of a hijacked Korean supertanker anchored on the horizon.

“This one is bigger than Hobyo,” he says proudly.

The Marshall Islandsflagged VLCC Samho Dream is a third of a kilo-metre long, one of the three largest vessels ever hijacked by pirates, and carries an estimated $170 million of Iraqi crude destined for the United States.

“Enough to buy the whole of Galkayo,” Mohamed quips, in reference to the region’s largest city, which straddles the border with the neighbouring semi-autonomous state of Puntland.

Hobyo’s scattering of rundown houses and shacks looks anything but the nerve centre of an activity threatening global shipping.

“We have no schools, no farming, no fishing. It’s ground zero here,” says chief local elder Abdullahi Ahmed Barre. “And our most pressing concern is the sand, the city is disappearing, we are being buried alive and can’t resist.”

Gathered in the gloom of the council building, the elders haven’t seen a foreigner in years and the list of grievances is long.

“The nearest hospital is an eight-hour drive on a rough road.” “The water is undrinkable, too salty.” “When the tsunami struck, nobody helped.” “This is one of the most peaceful parts of Somalia, why is there no assistance?”

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