"Is there any country in the world where an insurgency breaks out and is not met by the army?" Saddam asked the chief judge of his trial, as he and six co-defendants returned to the dock for a fifth hearing.

Saddam and the others, including his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali", face genocide and other charges over the Anfal campaign.

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 brutal Anfal campaign.

If found guilty, he faces execution by hanging.

Saddam told judge Abdallah al-Ameri that the Kurdish rebels should not be referred as "peshmergas", meaning "those who face death" in Kurdish.

"I suggest the expression peshmerga be deleted from the transcript and replaced by the word insurgent," he said.

Referring to Kurds who had supported his regime, he said that "Arabs and Kurds sacrificed a great deal fighting against the insurgency."

Saddam stressed that by calling them peshmergas it gave them a special status, rather than as insurgents whom the government had the legal right to combat.

Prior to Saddam's outburst, a Kurdish villager whose sisters and mother were allegedly killed and buried in a mass grave by his forces, expressed relief upon seeing the former ruler in the dock.

"Congratulations Saddam, now you are in a cage," said Abdel Ghafur Hassan Abdallah, who fled to Iran after his village of Saydar in the northern Sulaimaniyah province was attacked by Saddam's forces in February 1988.

The Anfal trial, which began on August 21, has seen Kurdish witnesses give chilling accounts of how Saddam's forces swept through their villages of northern Iraq killing and gassing people while destroying their homes.

"I don't know why this happened to them (his sisters and mother), just because we are Kurdish?" said Abdallah, accusing Saddam and the others of killing his family members.

Abdallah said he spent four months in Iran after the attack and returned to a government complex built by the former regime to house people displaced from the Kurdish prohibited zones in the north.

He later found that his sisters and mother were killed and buried in "a mass grave in Mosul. They were Anfalized," he said referring to the term used by the Kurds to describe those killed or missing in the campaign.

After the fall of Saddam in 2003, a local court showed him the ID cards of his family members found in a mass grave, indicating that they were killed.

After Abdallah's testimony, two more Kurds testified against the accused, before the trial was adjourned until Wednesday.

Omar Khidr Mohammed Amin, a taxi driver in Sulaimaniyah, charged that 19 of his family members living in the village of Sakaniya were allegedly killed in the Anfal campaign.

In 2004, the court of Sulaimaniyah showed him the IDs of some of his family members, he said.

"I wanted to go to the mass grave to see their bodies but they prevented me. They told me it was not a good place to go, not a proper place, this mass grave."

Amin also accused Saddam of burning mosques in the northern regions, saying: "I want to know what kind of Koran Saddam Hussein holds in his lap and how it is different from the ones in our mosques that he burned down."

On Monday, Saddam, who cradles the holy book during court hearings, charged that such graphic testimonies by Kurdish witnesses against him and his forces were fuelling a division in Iraq.

"The whole beginning (of witness testimonies) is aimed at creating a split within Iraq between the Kurds and Arabs," Saddam said in a tirade from the dock.

Saddam, showing flashes of anger, claimed on Monday how he had on several occasions acted on behalf of the Kurdish minority in Iraq.

He also stressed that it was he who agreed autonomy for the Kurds in northern Iraq back in 1970, when he was vice president.

On Tuesday, Saddam also accused the lawyer of witness Abdallah of being an agent "of Iranians and Zionists."

"We will crush your head," he threatened.