Khadaffy Janjalani - Background On Basilan Birthplace

Background On Basilan Birthplace

Khadafi Abubakar Janjalani was born in 1975 in Isabela City, currently one of the smallest and poorest, or 5th class, cities of the Philippines. Located on the north of the island of Basilan, Isabela is also the capital of Basilan province, across the Basilan Strait from Zamboanga City. But Isabela City is administrated under the Zamboanga Peninsula political region north of the island of Basilan, while the rest of the island province of Basilan is now (since 1996) governed as part of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) to the east.

Consequently, being on the social or political division line, Isabela City and Basilan island have seen some of the fiercest fighting between government troops and the Muslim separatist group Abu Sayyaf through the early 2000s.

Before Khadafi Janjalani was born, in the early 1970s, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) was the main Muslim rebel group fighting in the Basilan region of the southern Philippines.

In the late 70s, Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani, Khadaffy Janjalani's older brother, was a former teacher from Basilan, who had studied theology and Arabic in Libya, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Abdurajik then became a veteran of the war against the Soviet Union during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. During that time, he allegedly met Osama Bin Laden, and was given $6 million to establish his own offshoot group in the southern Philippines, out of members of the extant MNLF.

By then, as a political solution in the southern Philippines, ARMM had been created, in 1989, when the younger Janjalani was thirteen years old, growing up on Basilan.