ABSTRACT
Abu Sayyaf has been waging a bloody insurgency in the Southern Philippines since 1989 with the goal of establishing an Islamic State. What became Abu Sayyaf started as a faction of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) under the leadership of Abdurajak Ustadz Janjalani. In 1991 Amir Janjalani split away and with help from Mohammad Jamal Khalifa, the brother-in-law of al-Qaeda Amir Osama bin Laden, renamed his organization the Abu Sayyaf, meaning “Father of the Swordsman”. The Abu Sayyaf, like the MNLF and Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), draws largely from the Moro peoples of the Southern Philippines, but it has its own distinct meritocratic leadership and recruitment systems. While it has had some familial leaders, they did not take office chronologically, nor did they gain ascendency due to nepotism or by inheritance.
Divided into sections, this chapter examines the organizational structure of Abu Sayyaf and discusses meritocratic leadership, command and control, and organizational morphology. It then looks at the external pressures exerted against Abu Sayyaf, particularly in the counterinsurgency and law-enforcement contexts. The chapter concludes with a discussion of its resilience and endogenous and exogenous adaptation to shock from external pressures.
