Word: absentia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Born to a prosperous farming family in Tikrit, a small town 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, Saddam as a student eagerly joined the nationalist ferment against Iraq's pro-Western monarchy. In 1959, under sentence of death in absentia for his involvement in an assassination attempt against President Abdul Karim Kassem, a general who had seized power the year before, Saddam fled to Syria and Egypt. In Cairo he studied law and joined the Baath Party, a revolutionary group of Arab nationalists. He returned to Iraq in 1963, and by the time the Baathists staged their 1968 coup under...