Word: abdurajak
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...Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, a former Filipino Islamic scholar who battled the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, founded the fundamentalist Abu Sayyaf in 1991, splitting from the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) - a more mainstream Islamic political organization fighting for increased autonomy for Muslims in the southern Philippines - after the MNLF engaged in peace talks with the government...
...after its leader, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, was killed in a gun battle with police in 1998, the militant group changed course, stopping its bomb attacks and kidnapping potentially rich foreigners for ransom money to fund operations and gain support from local communities. In 2000 the group kidnapped 21 people - 19 of whom were foreigners - in Malaysia, 50 students and teachers from two schools on the island of Basilan, and at least 15 foreign journalists, including one reporter who was kidnapped and released twice...
...When Abdurajak's younger brother Khadaffy Janjalani took complete control of the group sometime around 2002, Abu Sayyaf renewed its ideological fervor for independence and refocused its efforts on bombmaking. In 2004 the group took responsibility for the most deadly terrorist attack in the history of the Philippines: the 2004 bombing of a ferry in Manila Bay that killed 116 people. By mid-2005, the Philippine government says Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian terrorist group responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, had trained some 60 members of Abu Sayyaf to make bigger, better explosives. Two Jemaah...
...Qaeda. No less a figure than Osama bin Laden's own brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, personally arranged initial funding for the group through one of the Islamic charities he operated in the Philippines at the time. But after the death of Abu Sayyaf's founder Abdurajak Janjalani in a firefight with police in August 1998, its religious and political goals were dropped in favor of kidnapping for ransom. The group was paid millions of dollars by the governments of Malaysia, Libya, Germany and France to release hostages seized from a Malaysian diving resort in April...
...M.I.L.F., according to Murad, is not allied with Abu Sayyaf, and he questions Abu Sayyaf's conversion to Islamic ideals and to the cause of a separate Muslim nation in the southern Philippines. "The original Abu Sayyaf group, under the older brother Abdurajak, had a political objective," he says. "As far as the personality of the younger brother Khadaffy is concerned, he's not an ideological leader and I don't know how much control he has with the organization...