Saddam’s repressive violence could take on genocidal proportions, a reprisal incommensurate with the original action. Take for example his response to an attempt on his life while visiting the town of Dujail in southern Iraq (1982). He “disappeared” 140 suspects, rounded up and imprisoned over a thousand men, women and children (torturing many of them), banished them to another region, and with bulldozers wiped Dujail off the map. In the al-Anfal Campaign of 1988 Saddam’s cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, sought to solve the so-called Kurdish Problem in Northern Iraq by razing thousands of villages, executing males between 13 and 70, throwing their bodies into mass graves, placing the women and children in horrendous relocation centers, and most notoriously firing chemical weapons into many Kurdish villages, most notably Halabja where 5,000 people died. (Thousands of other victims endured horrific disfigurement and long-term aftereffects.) Ultimately over 150,000 Iraqi civilians died in the campaign.