Saddam and six co-defendants were back in the dock after a three-week recess in their trial over the brutal 1987-88 Anfal campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq which prosecutors say left 182,000 people dead.

Katherine Elias Mikhail, once a peshmerga Kurdish guerrilla, described how she was present when first her unit and then a year later her village were gassed by Saddam's air force.

"I saw hundreds of people -- not dozens but hundreds -- and they were vomiting and teary-eyed," she said describing a 1987 attack on a peshmerga base. "People with me collapsed because they had lost their sight."

In late 1988, the planes struck her village.

"We had been frequently attacked by aircraft, but this time the sound of the explosions was not as loud as before and after the explosion there was white smoke," said the woman who now works as a writer in the United States.

The trial was later adjourned until Tuesday.

Saddam and six co-defendants stand accused of slaughtering 182,000 Kurds by gassing them and bombing their villages to quell an insurgency that coincided with the last years of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Most prominent among his co-accused is Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali" over his alleged role in gas attacks.

Mikhail, who has long since shed her guerrilla fatigues for a business suit, said she lost most of her family to the old regime and her complaint was against Saddam and Chemical Ali and "the international companies who supplied the Iraqi regimes with these weapons".

She was followed on the witness stand by Ahmed Abdel Rahman, who described how troops came through his village in 1987, set fire to his village and drove off their cattle.

"We followed after them and begged them to return our cattle, and they told us that the Iraqi government had ordered them to kill us and loot our livestock," he said, going on to describe his subsequent imprisonment.

The trial resumed on the same day the United States marked the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that left close to 3,000 people dead.

On Friday a US Senate report concluded that Saddam had no links with Al-Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks, as US President George W. Bush's administration had repeatedly charged.

Saddam, who is also awaiting a verdict in a trial over the killing of Shiite villagers after an attempt on his life in 1982, is charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity over the Anfal campaign.

If found guilty, he faces execution by hanging.

The genocide trial began on August 21, and the first three days saw Kurdish villagers testify that their villages had been gassed, their fields destroyed and their families exterminated in brutal death camps run by Saddam's forces.

At one point, Saddam launched an outburst over the national flag.

"The flag behind you," he said pointing at the judge. "We inherited it, I did not establish it," he said.

The northern Kurdish provinces have stopped flying the flag on the grounds that the horrors of the Anfal were performed in its name.

Monday's session began with a Tunisian lawyer for Saddam quitting the defense team after the judge said foreigners could only work as lgal advisors rather than attorneys.

In the previous trial, in which Saddam was charged with the mass murder of 148 Shiites from the village of Dujail, witnesses were concealed behind screens, fearing reprisals from Sunni insurgents loyal to the former leader.

The US government was reluctant to criticise Saddam during the Anfal campaign, preferring the Iraqi dictator to his clerical foes in neighbouring Iran as the lesser of two evils.

Washington's tone hardened after the September 11 attacks on the United States, and he was accused of links to the Al-Qaeda plane hijackers. For many Americans, this strengthened the case for the US-led invasion of Iraq.