ABDURAJAK JANJALANI was killed in an encounter with the police in Basilan in December 1998. A month later, Edwin Angeles, who had accompanied Khaddafy in the talks with the generals in Camp Crame, was also killed. Angeles had been the Abu Sayyaf's operations chief. He was locked in a fierce power struggle for control of the organization at the time of his death. His assassin was allegedly an Abu Sayyaf member.

It is uncertain if Abdurajak had known that his younger brother had tried to negotiate for his surrender in 1997 with the National Police's top brass led by then Director General Recaredo Sarmiento. The brothers were not exactly of one mind. Sadain and fellow Muslim scholar Samuel Tan say Khaddafy lacks the ideological and religious moorings of Abdurajak. The latter could spend a day discussing Islam, the Koran and the dynamics of Islamic movements in the world with anyone who wishes to talk to him. Khaddafy, in comparison, is more comfortable in battle talk, in the ways of the world.

A senior police official who interrogated Khaddafy in jail describes him as "playful…who knows nothing when it comes to ideology." In 1995 in Sulu, the Marines arrested Khaddafy and Juvenal Bruno, an Islamic convert who also belonged to Abu Sayyaf. It was Bruno who sounded more like Abdurajak, says the same official who later interrogated both men at a Camp Crame jail.

Some of the Abu Sayyaf leaders based in Sulu had fought in the Afghanistan war in their teens. Given the choice, they have told journalists, they would not condone the kidnapping of non-combatants. But it is easy to justify a money-making venture: the Abu Sayyaf has not been receiving foreign funding and it has to sustain the operation of its fighters and their families. The Sipadan kidnapping, for instance, was not proof of foreign support for the bandits' cause; it was proof of their attempt to get foreign funds.

Even communist guerrillas have at one time kidnapped civilians for fund-raising activities. But then these were special operations projects usually not admitted to the public. The Abu Sayyaf has done the reverse. It has used its fund-raising scheme as a political tool for still unclear objectives.

This has grown more apparent with Abdurajak's death. Tan says Khaddafy represents a "clear deviation" from his older brother. Other observers say this could make the Abu Sayyaf more dangerous, as it now lacks a solid ideological foundation to work on. But even under Abdurajak, the Abu Sayyaf was already kidnapping and killing with abandon—proof that the older Janjalani was not able to match his rhetoric with the realities demanded by his jobless and hapless constituents.

To a cold-hearted military strategist, the Abu Sayyaf—with its inherent weaknesses in structure and leadership—has been, and will always be, ripe for exploitation. The reality is that the group gives Islam a bad name, and it is the height of hypocrisy for any military strategist to deny being tempted to exploit that. In fact, after the Sipadan kidnapping, police and military intelligence agents drafted separate internal briefs calling the incident as the spark of a likely united front of "Islamic extremists" in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The Sipadan kidnapping has been used as a showcase against "militant" Islam and for a big, U.S.-led support for efforts to crush it.

The Abu Sayyaf has a track record of being used in this regard. In 1995, intelligence agents did not think twice in using Angeles to the hilt, involving him in the PNP's counter-terrorist campaign, despite knowing that he remained connected to Abdurajak. An Army general once assigned to Basilan claims that he was aware Marines on the island had used Angeles to prop up the Abu Sayyaf in the hope of triggering divisions within the Muslim rebel movement. "But it (Abu Sayyaf) grew into a Frankenstein that they could no longer control," says the general who spent 28 years in Mindanao.

Khaddafy, more than Abdurajak, has shown skills that he could be a player like Angeles. He and Angeles, in fact, according to sources close to both, were kindred spirits. The new Abu Sayyaf chief is honed in bargaining; to him, everything seems negotiable. But he is not the only one in control of the group, since some Abu leaders had been trained in the Middle East and who have more or less some ideological foundation to work on.

It is wrong therefore for government to assume that it is dealing with a cohesive organization with a set of doctrines, rules or solid leadership. But it would take a more sophisticated mind—not a conventional one so used to fighting conventional wars—to confront, and defeat, a reckless but heavily armed crew called the Abu Sayyaf.