For over three decades, Abu Sayyaf has waged a campaign of violence in Sulu Province, pursuing independence from the Philippines as part of the broader Moro conflict. The group carried out the worst terrorist attack in Filipino history in 2004, bombing a ferry that killed 116 people. In 2016, they pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. Their methods include improvised explosive devices and the kidnapping of foreigners for ransom, particularly in the waters around Sulu. In the days before the August 2020 bombings, Philippine security forces had arrested several Abu Sayyaf militants, and Sulu was on high alert in anticipation of retribution. The alert was not enough.

The first bomb was a motorcycle-borne device positioned next to a military vehicle, timed to detonate during the army's humanitarian distribution. The second attack introduced a relatively new tactic to the Philippines: suicide bombing. The female bomber approached the cordoned perimeter of the first blast, a calculated move designed to strike at the first responders and security forces gathering at the scene. The Islamic State's East Asia Province, operating through Abu Sayyaf, claimed responsibility the following day. Investigators identified Abu Sayyaf bombmaker Mundi Sawadjaan as the likely creator of both devices. The entire province of Sulu was placed on lockdown. Five days later, soldiers searching for the perpetrators in the nearby municipality of Patikul were ambushed by Abu Sayyaf fighters, resulting in the death of one Filipino soldier and two militants.

The bombings were shadowed by a disturbing earlier incident. On June 29, nearly two months before the attacks, four Army intelligence personnel investigating the possible presence of female suicide bombers in Sulu had been killed by Jolo police officers in a shooting. The police attempted to plant evidence to cover up the killings. The military stated that this incident disrupted the intelligence operations that might have averted the August bombings, and raised the possibility that the police officers involved were connected to the suicide bombers themselves. It was a revelation that exposed not just the threat from militant groups but the fractures within the Philippine security establishment itself, fractures that cost lives.

The 2020 Jolo bombings were the latest in a pattern of violence that has defined life in Sulu for decades. They came barely eighteen months after the twin bombings at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in January 2019, which killed twenty people during Sunday mass. Analysts have noted that the rise of suicide terrorism in the Philippines is driven by the ideology of violent extremism propagated by Islamic State-affiliated foreign fighters who exploit local grievances, historical animosities, and feelings of injustice, particularly in the conflict-affected areas of Mindanao. The fourteen people who died on August 24 joined a long list of those killed in a conflict that predates any single organization claiming responsibility for it, a conflict rooted in centuries of tension between the central Philippine state and the Muslim communities of the southern archipelago.