page_title: Khadaffy Janjalani
section_title: Background on Basilan birthplace
hierarchical_section_title: Khadaffy Janjalani / Background on Basilan birthplace
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the Basilan showing the location of Isabela City
context_page_description: Khadaffy Abubakar Janjalani was the nominal leader of the Moro militant group known as Abu Sayyaf and the leader of one of its factions.
  Janjalani was also known as Daf or Pek. He was a citizen of the Philippines and spoke both Tausug and Tagalog, as well as some Arabic. According to the FBI, he was quiet, reserved, indecisive and overconfident.
  Janjalani was indicted in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, for his alleged involvement in terrorist acts, including hostage kidnapping and murder, against United States nationals and other foreign nationals in and around the Republic of the Philippines. Janjalani allegedly served as the Amir or spiritual leader of Abu Sayyaf Group, which allegedly took the foreign nationals hostage.
  For that indictment, on February 24, 2006, Janjalani was among six fugitives in the second and most recent group of indicted fugitives to be added to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list along with two fellow members of Abu Sayyaf.
  The United States government offered a 5 million US Dollar reward for Janjalani's capture.
context_section_description: Khadafi Abubakar Janjalani was born in 1975 in Isabela City, currently one of the smallest 4th income 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–Afghan War. 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.
caption: Basilan island, with Isabela City in red.
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