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Heavily armed mujahedeen guard the perimeter of a fortified bungalow office, as the veteran leader of the Philippines' decades-old Muslim insurgency makes a slow entrance.

At 61 and bespectacled, Murad Ebrahim looks more like someone's benign grandfather than the head of the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) that has been waging a bloody campaign for an independent Muslim homeland in Mindanao, the predominantly Catholic nation's southern third.

His mangled fingers, however, are testament to his years on the field as chief of the MILF's fierce Bangsamoro Islamic Armed Forces, before assuming the post as the organization's chairman and supreme leader in 2003.

Now in the twilight of his life and having been linked to countless deaths in battle, the civil engineering college drop-out says he wants to see peace and save the younger generation of Muslims from misery.

"The MILF leadership is very sincere and very determined to push through with the peace process," Murad told a small group of journalists that visited him at the MILF's Camp Darapanan, a sprawling territory bordering several Mindanao towns recognized by the government as the rebels' political center.

He said the quest for an independent homeland in the south had been paid for in too much blood. He wants to stem the flow before it spills over to younger fighters who are becoming increasingly radicalized by the continuing violence.

"It has already been about 40 years and this could still be carried on into the next generation, and the next," he said.

The Philippine military says up to 150,000 people have died in more than three decades of violence in Mindanao.

It has been a long journey of discovery for Murad, who was born in 1948 in the impoverished Muslim town of Sultan Kudarat, part of which is now a rebel stronghold.

He became involved in the Islamic movement ironically when he was a student at the Catholic-run Notre Dame University in Mindanao in the 1960s, Philippine government intelligence sources say.

Although he will not confirm it, the sources believe Murad joined anti-Soviet forces fighting alongside future Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Murad went underground at 22, when he met the charismatic Nur Misuari and the Egypt-trained Islamic scholar Salamat Hashim, the Philippine leaders of a Muslim-independence movement called the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).

Internal differences would later force him and Salamat to split from the MNLF, and form the MILF in 1978.

The MNLF would eventually forge their own peace deal with the government in 1996, while the MILF remained more militant.

But now Murad talks with apparent angst about the horrors of conflict, particularly the past 12 months of violence in Mindanao.

It began with the Supreme Court's rejection of a proposed deal that would have given the MILF political and economic control of over 700 territories it claims as its ancestral domain.

In retaliation, two MILF commanders broke a five-year-old ceasefire and launched deadly attacks across the island, triggering fighting that left more than 300 people dead and 750,000 displaced.

"We have seen the experiences of the civilian population during the last resumption of hostilities and they have suffered so much," Murad said.

Both sides finally declared unilateral ceasefires in July, and last week indicated fresh peace talks would be held soon.

Those talks are the last chance to reach a settlement because those next in line to lead the MILF are fighters aged in their 30s or 40s who know little else beyond warfare, according to Murad.

And true to his warrior instincts, Murad warned that although the MILF was pushing for peace, it was also building up its strength "to be ready to defend ourselves" in case the government reneged on a future deal.

"Our training now (for young leaders) is geared towards nation building, geared towards the peace, but it is also geared towards a situation where they have to defend themselves."