"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 on genocide charges, 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 charges including genocide 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 also 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 made 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 the Kurdish 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.

Describing the attack, he said: "Under cover of darkness I could hear the screaming of children. We fled and were chased by Iraqi forces and all around us were artillery bombardments."

Abdallah said he spent four months in Iran after the attack and returned to one of the government complexes built by the former regime to house people taken out of 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.

In 1991 he returned to the village only to find it completely burned.

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.

On Monday, Saddam 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.

"I want to give a message to the Iraqi people that they should not suffer from this guilt that they killed Kurds. This is shameful," he said.

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

"After the Iran-Iraq war ... I made a statement on TV and radio giving orders that no Iraqi security force should arrest Kurds, and if anyone has problems with Kurds, they should complain to Saddam Hussein."

The former dictator also said 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.

Saddam called for non-American international experts to test whether the IDs of Abdallah's sisters and mother matched with the soil from the mass grave.