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LAAYOUNE, Western Sahara (AP) - Keltoum El-Khayat left home barefoot at age 15, along with five other teenagers, telling her parents she was going to stay the night with her aunt. Instead she joined a war against Morocco for the independence of a Colorado-sized chunk of northwest African desert called Western Sahara.
It was the start of a circuitous 31-year odyssey against the backdrop of the Cold War that would take her to Algeria, Cuba, Spain and Sweden, and finally deposit her on the other side of the conflict, back in Western Sahara as an adviser to the Moroccan government she was sworn to oppose.
Her former comrades call her a turncoat, but El-Khayat says her change of sides stems from a sense that the conflict, one of Africa's longest, can only end in compromise, and from her disillusionment with Polisario, the guerrilla movement that recruited her in 1975.
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