The president of the Kurdish autonomous region, Massud Barzani, ordered the formation of a committee to study the allegations which come as bitter memories of the community's savage repression under Saddam's Sunni Arab-dominated regime have been revived by his latest war crimes trial.

"The committee will be legal and political and will choose a suitable approach for its work and prove the facts about these files," Barzani's chief of staff Fuad Hussein said Sunday.

"It will be a fact-finding mission and not a punishment committee," he said, adding that the committee's members would be appointed by Barzani in concert with the prime minister of the regional government and the speaker of the regional parliament.

"This matter has become huge and very sensitive for the people of Kurdistan," he said.

The names of more than 150 people who allegedly spied on their fellow Kurds for Saddam's mukhabarat intelligence service after the Kurdish uprising of 1991 were published by the Awina (Mirror) and Hawalati (Citizen) newspapers Friday.

According to the newspapers, which both went through several print runs on the day of publication, the mukhabarat recruited people close to the two main Kurdish rebel leaders, Barzani and Jalal Talabani, now Iraq's president.

The allegations drew demands for an inquiry from members of both former rebel factions -- Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan -- and by Saturday more than half of the 111 MPs in the regional parliament had signed a petition calling for an immediate debate.

"Those who worked with the mukhabarat must be tried," said PUK regional lawmaker Ariz Abdallah.

"These agents of the odious Saddam regime must become examples for others like them in the future," said KDP counterpart Khiman Zirar.

The allegations also prompted a spate of law suits against the alleged informers by their victims and a variety of threats against the journalists by those named.

Adel Omar, who works for a computer maintenance company in the Iraqi Kurdish cultural capital of Sulaimaniyah said he was "shocked and stunned" when he saw how many big names in the two main former rebel groups had worked for the Baathist regime.

"Publishing the files showed how the Iraqi mukhabarat infiltrated the parties and the Kurdish administration," he said, adding that he hoped the government would hold them accountable.

The revelations come at a particularly sensitive time for Iraqi Kurds after Saddam and six co-defendants went on trial charged with genocide over the 1988 Anfal campaign.

The campaign, in which hundreds of thousands were gassed, relocated and their villages destroyed was not carried out just by Iraqi soldiers, but also by pro-government Kurdish militias.

Victims' families have been calling for those who collaborated in the Anfal to be brought to justice too, not just Saddam and his main henchmen.

For Yassin Taha, a high school teacher in Sulaimaniyah, the newspaper reports of Kurdish spies just made him furious.

"They have to receive the necessary punishment for their treachery against their own kind," he said.