An Iraqi actress. The star of the country's first film, Mr Saeed Afandi The Respectable, the first Iraqi woman to act on the stage and assumed the stage name, Zainab. She had great success in the theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. Zainab was full of conflict and replete with ironies. Her career ran against her family background and ideology which contradicted the society and politics of the country Zainab who was born Fakhriya Abdul Karim exiled herself to Yemen, then to Syria and finally to Sweden in 1991 where cancer took her life.