DAVAO CITY -- Jamal Khalifa maintained an office on San Marcelino Street in Malate, Manila, not far from the Josefa Apartments where Ramzi Yousef allegedly plotted to kill Pope John Paul II in 1995.
Little did people close to Khalifa know that his brother-in-law, Osama bin Laden, would become infamous for the Sept. 11, 2001, bombings in the United States.
The two-story office of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IRRO) was run by Khalifa and a Libyan whose Tripoli-based private group offered study tour grants to Libya.
Khalifa’s marriage to a Filipino Muslim woman boosted his Mindanao connections through which the IIRO established organizational partnerships to strengthen the Islamic da’wah (propagation), especially among converts to Islam in many parts of the country.
The IRRO funded the construction of orphanages in Awang, Crossing Simuay in Maguindanao and of Islamic cultural centers in Cotabato and Zamboanga City.
The propagation program for the “orphans of war” also covered short-course da’wah training for Islamic teachers.
Khalifa was killed in Madagascar on Tuesday in what appeared to be a burglary, his brother Malek said.
Malek said 25 to 30 gunmen broke into his brother’s house “while he was sleeping” and killed him. The Al-Arabiya satellite TV channel said Khalifa was staying at a precious stones mine he owned when he was killed.
In an interview with a professor of the Mindanao State University in February 2006, published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Jan. 22, Khadaffy Janjalani, head of the Abu Sayyaf bandit group, said that his group had received funds from two men close to Bin Laden.
Janjalani said his group received P6 million from Khalifa and Yousef in exchange for sending volunteers to Afghanistan.
Khalifa, in a letter to the Inquirer published on Saturday, denied giving money to the Abu Sayyaf.
Former workers of Bin Laden’s Saudi Arabia-based construction company said that Bin Laden, by recruiting workers abroad, must have pre-planned the deployment of Islamist militants of different nationalities to aid the mujahideen (soldiers of religion) in Afghanistan then fighting a Marxist government.
Being rich, Bin Laden did not have to rely on IRRO resources for his own recruitment of fighters for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Study group
Bin Laden had become the common thread between Khalifa and terrorism.
Yousef was said to have created his own network among young Muslim students he would frequently meet as a “study group.”
Yousef is a nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged chief architect of the al-Qaeda terrorist network and alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Yousef was convicted by a US federal court as a mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
He fled the United States after the World Trade Center bombing.
Police said Yousef was also behind the plot to bomb US-bound flights from East Asia over a 48-hour period. The plot was discovered in January 1995 when a fire broke out in the apartment shared by Yousef and Abdul Murad.
Yousef was arrested in February 1995 in Islamabad, Pakistan, and returned to New York.
Scholarship in Libya
It was Yousef who recommended Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, elder brother of Khadaffy, to the IIRO study grant program, giving him a slot in a two-year program on Islamic da’wah (lay preaching) in Libya in 1989, according to sources.
Khadaffy became the Abu Sayyaf chief after his brother died. He was killed in September last year in Sulu province in an attack by a team of soldiers.
The IRRO’s two-year scholarship given to the elder Janjalani allowed Yousef to drag Khalifa’s name into terrorism, the sources said.
Nom de guerre
When Janjalani came home in 1993, his nom de guerre, Abu Sayyaf, was introduced as the bogeyman of modern-day extremism by an Islamic professor from the University of the Philippines in a lengthy Philippine News Agency dispatch.
For its operations in the country, the IRRO received funding support from the Libyan organization, later known to its beneficiaries in the Philippines as the Muammar Ghaddafy Foundation, the sources said.
Offered the Ghaddafy scholarship program were Filipino Muslims and non-Muslims of socialist political persuasion, among them, members of the Moro National Liberation Front, students, activists, critics and writers.
One beneficiary said the Libyan government had hoped to breed broad-based social advocacy to free that country from the UN economic sanctions.
Of the several Moros who were alumni of the da’wah training in Libya, three were interviewed for this story. Only Janjalani among the alumni who came home became an extremist, the Inquirer learned.
Junie Arances, who was recruited into the Afghan war, identified four other Moro militants who had fought the Russians with him.
Gov’t crackdown
Neither Janjalani nor any of his known Abu Sayyaf companions were among them.
Arances, a Muslim convert from Bukidnon province, had been offered a four-year language program at the Imam Saud University in Saudi Arabia in 1984.
Another scholarship beneficiary, who asked not to be identified, said his schooling abroad did not change him.
Resources dwindled and IRRO projects deteriorated as the Philippine government cracked down on the group’s connections, including those in Pangasinan province.
Because of the crackdown, no organization, local or foreign, has continued giving funds for the maintenance of IRRO projects and salaries of the staff.
As a result, the projects, probably meant to be noble, could fail or, worse, become a burden to its beneficiaries. Inquirer Mindanao
