Word: muntaha
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...Melodrama becomes Muntaha, a part-time social worker who looks like a socialite in her chic black woollen overcoat, heavy make-up, purple nail polish and chestnut-streaked shoulder-length hair. Her verbal flourishes borrow heavily from official pamphlets and presidential speeches. But the emotion they convey is her own. Over three days of long conversations, at her home and office, it becomes clear that this bright and otherwise positive-thinking woman is indeed willing to die for Saddam Hussein. Will she back away when the shooting actually starts? That's impossible to tell, but her loyalty to Saddam runs...
...Muntaha is, after all, a creature of Saddam's Iraq. "The president has looked after me," she says. A member of the ruling Ba'ath Party since she was 12, she was married just three months when her fighter-pilot husband was killed in 1981, an early victim of the Iraq-Iran war. Ever since, she's been wedded to the state, drawing her husband's pension, teaching 'home science' at a government-run high school for girls, and volunteering at the General Federation of Iraqi Women. Her daughter Sabreen, 21, studies journalism at Baghdad University, and Muntaha hopes...
...close enough to the presidential coterie to be rich. Between her salary and her husband's pension, Muntaha makes 48,000 Iraqi dinars ($20) a month, and she only gets by because she lives in the home of her older brother, Mohammed Zaki. But she does have some influence in the women's federation: as deputy director of a Baghdad field office, she's responsible for planning and logistics across a quarter of the city. Oh, and she's met Saddam four times. "The president's door is always open to his people," she says, lapsing again into officialspeak...
...Muntaha, the coming war will be as much about preserving a political system as anything else. "Who is George Bush to say how Iraq should be ruled?" she asks. "Saddam is our leader because we want him to be, and we're not going to let anybody take him away from...
...Whether or not Muntaha and her AK-47 can repulse G.I.s from Baghdad, she represents a serious problem for American military planners. The resistance they will face may not come only from Saddam's army or his Republican Guard. Millions of ordinary Iraqis, like Muntaha, have benefited from Saddam's rule and have a personal stake in his survival. And they won't all have to make the ultimate sacrifice for their leader in order to complicate matters for the Americans...