Later-model guns are quietly purchased from Philippine army units. The MILF also makes its own armaments. Hidden on a jungled hillside within the camp perimeter, one of several munitions factories turns out RPG-2 grenade launchers and their warheads. Salamat Hashim's presence at Abu Bakr is as mysterious as his surprise return to the Philippines last year. But in southern and central Mindanao his religious standing and political prestige are legendary.
Security is tight, and a score of bodyguards stake out the area.
Cairo's Al Azhar University. Before long, Hashim was mixing radical Moro politics with revolutionary Islamist teachings. In 1962 he and friends founded the Moro Liberation Front. Hashim returned to the Philippines in 1970 to meet Misuari and other radicals. As a librarian in Cotabato, he was caught up in the groundswell of political violence then beginning in Mindanao.