SUMMARY
The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), meaning the ‘bearer of the sword’ in Arabic, was founded by Abdurajak Janjalani in 1991. The group originally appeared with the name Mujahideen Commando Freedom Fighters and are also known to as al-Harakat al-Islamiyya or AHAI. The group is a militant Islamist separatist organisation, based primarily on the islands of Basilian and Jolo in Southern Philippines.
In 1976, the first modern Mindanoan nationalist insurgent group, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) signed a peace agreement with the Philippine government after abandoning its secessionist goals. In the wake of the accord, dissident break-away factions formed and the most prominent, the “New MNLF” (the faction which became the Moro Islamic National Liberation, MILF, in 1984) was led by Hashim Salaamat. In 1980, Hashim Salaamat started training camps in Peshawar, Pakistan for Muslim Filipinos who were ready to combat alongside the Mujahideen fighters against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan - among the trainees was the ASG founder Abdurajak Janjalani. The Filipino camp was led by Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, a scholar of Islam whose belief in the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam found him favour with many wealthy Saudis, including Osama bin Laden. In 1989, deeply inspired by Abdul Sayyaf, Janjalani vowed to pursue “jihad qital”, armed struggle, to create a pure Islamic state in the southern Philippines based on Salafi Wahhabism, a conservative version of Salafism. Thus when Janjalani returned to his native Basilian Island in the south-western Sulu archipelago in the late eighties, he took the alias "Abu Sayyaf" in honour of his tutor and together with Amilhusin Jumaani and Wahad Akbar, formed the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) which mostly consisted of returned Filipino fighters and younger MNLF dissidents. The central goal of ASG was the establishment of an independent Islamic theocratic state of Mindanao, but unlike MNFL and MILF, the group saw its national objective as tied to a global effort to assert the dominance of Islam through armed struggle.
The global perspective of the struggle is likely to have been greatly coloured by founder Abdurajak Janjalani’s studies and travels in different parts of the Muslim world. He attended an Islamic university in Saudi Arabia, graduating in 1981 before studying Islamic jurisprudence at Ummu I-Qura in Mecca for 3 years and it is believed that Janjalani became radicalized during this period. After his studies, he travelled in Libya and Southern Philippines, met Hashim Salaamat of the “New MNLF” in Pakistan and then continued on to join the Mujahedin and fought the Soviets for several years in Afghanistan. With the death of Abdurajak Janjalani in 1998 during a shootout with the military and police, it has been asserted that some of the ideological impetus was lost. Following the death of ASG’s founder, ASG split up into three distinct factions and has been oscillating between ideology-driven and profit-driven motivations. Much of the vacillating was reportedly caused by two of the new leaders Aldam Tilao (Abu Subaya) and Ghalib Andang (aka Commander Robot). Abu Subaya was killed in a joint U.S.-Filipino ambush in June 2002, while Ghalib Andang was captured in December 2003 and subsequently killed in 2005 as he attempted to escape from jail. With the elimination of two high-profile leaders, authority in the loosely knit group was consolidated by Khadaffy Janjalani, the younger brother of the founder, who appeared to be more intent on bringing the group back to its religious origins and building upon his brother’s legacy. The younger Janjalani, who was on a U.S. list of most wanted terrorists and had a five-million dollar bounty on his head, was killed in a September 2006 battle.
The two larger Muslim separatist movements in the Philippines, MNLF and MILF, have denied any supportive links to ASG and they have openly criticized ASG’s attacks against civilians. However, there are clear indications of cooperation between ASG and local hard-line units of MNLF and MILF, especially around training of recruits, and increasingly so since the post 9/11 government offensives forced the ASG leadership out of their base areas in Sulu and Basilian into the traditional turf of MILF.
The regional network, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) has reportedly provided ASG with training and technical assistance. Further, both JI and ASG have been working with the Rajah Solaiman Movement (RSM) – a part of the Balik Islam trend – militant converts to Islam based in Manila and northern Luzon, who have been instrumental for ASG’s infiltration of the Philippine urban heartland.
There have been varying accounts regarding Abu Sayyaf’s relationship to al-Qaeda. There is general consensus that ASG received funding and support from al-Qaeda in the early 1990s; ASG arose to prominence largely thanks to funds from Saudi charities administered by bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammad Jamal Khalifa. However, there is less information regarding the more recent connection between the groups. Nonetheless, both the Philippine and the U.S. governments declared ASG a terrorist group with links to al-Qaeda.
Libya has been accused of supporting Abu Sayyaf, primarily because it was the conduit for kidnapping ransoms paid by foreign governments to ASG in 2000 and for its charity work in Abu Sayyaf turf, raising the possibility that Libyan money gets channelled to the group via these transactions.
During the Taliban regime, ASG allegedly received arms and munitions from Afghanistan.
ASG has been involved in the intrastate and one-sided categories of UCDP organised violence.
