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What connects the town of Ainata to Tripoli of the West?

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In this small town, a woman called Aziza was once one of Gaddafi's bodyguards.

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Aziza Ibrahim comes to us bearing only her memories. 17 years following her return from Libya

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the "revolutionary nun" as Gaddafi calls his bodyguards

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decided to speak out about being one of these women.

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She has no photos or evidence, but we have to believe her, because she knows more than she should.

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"If you want to be a bodyguard, you don't marry, because he calls them nuns and nuns don't marry."

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"Secondly, she has to have a strong personality, have no need for her family."

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"She might have to kill her family."

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"One guard for example, Jamile Gurnan, she used to terrify us,

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she killed his cousin Hassan Shkal, Shkal are also Qaddadfa (of his tribe)."

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"He raised his voice against Muammar in a discussion

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in front of us all, as soon as he raised his voice, she shot him, in front of Muammar."

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In 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Beirut, Aziza travelled to Libya with a Nasserite student group

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As events turned out, she met Muammar, and accompanied him in his first visit to China

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as one of his chosen guards.

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"The real guards who are with him, if you notice, some are black and have a certain rank, and the other ten or so

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were there to give the appearance that all his guards are women. That women guard him not men

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This is intended to lift women's standing, to show he believes women are equal to men

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Equal in all duties and rights. As he said in his Green Book, "the woman is female and the man is male."

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[Laughs.] That's the only difference between them.

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"And the woman bears children and the man doesn't."

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This is in the Green Book, the social section.

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One day, the Popular Commitee took Aziza and other bodyguards and students

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to a university campus where Gaddafi was giving a speech.

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What happened there couldn't be imagined.

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"They brought in the students they wanted to hang."

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"One was from law school, his accusation was that he called someone he knew in Iraq."

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"Another was an economics student. They were four hanged altogether."

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"The first person, he didn't die. They pulled on his legs till he died, and I was sat there frozen."

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"At 2 am they came to us and said you need to go to the sport stadium. They took us to the winter arena."

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"He executed 17 people, students, shooting not hanging."

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"17, in front of us, in this gym so the sound was amplified."

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"You weren't allowed to scream. You had to chant."

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"These are traitors. One of them, he wasn't even the traitor, his cousin was a defected pilot."

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"They couldn't arrest his cousin so they took him instead."

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Aziza watches the man she used to guard face the end of his rule and wishes he would die

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She says if she was still his bodyguard, she would have killed him herself.