BRUSSELS - AFTER the UN Security Council's green light, it is now only a question of when, and not whether, land military operations will be launched against pirates sheltering in Somalia, according to experts.

The Council, in a unanimous vote on Tuesday, gave nations battling armed and increasingly audacious pirates in the Gulf of Aden a one-year mandate to act inside the lawless country, a good way, analysts say, to stop them.

'It's clear that to deal with a problem like the one in Somalia, you need a wide-ranging operation. Catching a few pirates at sea will not be enough,' said one European diplomat.

He noted that the international fleet of around 15 warships in the Gulf - one of the world's busiest shipping areas - had barely helped slow the pirates, let alone eradicate them.

Increasingly emboldened, pirates using fleets of small, fast boats have carried out more than 100 attacks in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean this year.

Last month, they captured world attention when they hijacked the Saudi-owned super-tanker Sirius Star, carrying two million barrels of crude oil, and demanded a US$25 million (S$35.9 million) ransom for the ship and its crew.

It is one of about 17 vessels, including an arms-laden Ukrainian cargo ship, and some 300 sailors currently in pirate hands.

UN Security Council resolution 1846, from December 2, laid out the legal framework for the EU to launch last week Operation Atalanta, which will carry out anti-piracy duties and escort aid ships over the next 12 months.

But, the diplomat said, 'a land attack was never in Atalanta's mandate'.

The new resolution, 1851, provides for such a move and 'another sequence has begun, which aims to attack the problem at its roots', he said.

The EU has made no planning for such an operation, although Atalanta's commander, Rear Admiral Phillip Jones said: 'At every stage of the act of piracy, I'm content my force will have the rules of engagement they need.'

Yet the adoption of the new resolution, the second in just a few weeks, is a sign of the growing international resolve to rid the waters of the increasingly deadly attacks.

Russia had already suggested in November that a land operation should be carried out, while Nato has been considering what role it might play against piracy in the future.

'You don't stop piracy on the seas. You stop piracy on the land,' top alliance commander US General John Craddock said last month, although he insisted he has not been asked to study any land operation.

Prof Tanguy Struye, politics professor at Belgium's Louvain-la-Neuve university, said he could envisage 'a Franco-American commando operation, with France and the United States present in Djibouti and both having the necessary experience'.

He said they 'would be best placed to act militarily' in the region.

'The operation could be put together quite quickly, but first they would need intelligence that only Somalia's friends of convenience would be able to provide,' he said.

Prof Struye said an EU or Nato operation would simply take too long to mount, but he agreed with the assessment of other experts that the only way to overcome the problem of piracy definitively would be to help reduce poverty in Somalia itself.

Senior EU advisor on African affairs, Jean-Christophe Belliard, said last week that, ironically, the piracy problem has focused international attention and could ultimately help stop it.

'One of the results of this multiplication of piracy acts is that there is an awareness that it can't just be business as usual in Somalia. Now the international community ... is pushing for something strong to be done,' he said. -- AFP