Thousands of civilians were killed during the anti-insurgent campaigns, from early 1987 to late 1988. The attacks were part of a long campaign that destroyed approximately 4,500 Kurdish and at least 31 Assyrian Christian villages in northern Iraq and displaced at least a million of the estimated 3.5 million Iraqi Kurds. Amnesty International collected the names of more than 17,000 people who had "disappeared" in 1988. The campaign has been characterized as genocidal in nature. It is also characterized as gendercidal, because "battle-age" men were the primary targets, according to Human Rights Watch/Middle East. According to the Iraqi prosecutors and Kurdish officials, as many as 180,000 people were killed.