"Is there any country in the world where an insurgency breaks out and is not met by the army?," asked Saddam as he and six co-defendants attended the fifth hearing of his trial on genocide.

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

Refering to pro-regime Kurds, Saddam said, "Arabs and Kurds sacrficed a great deal fighting against the insurgency."

Saddam said that by calling them peshmerga it makes them seem something special rather than as an insurgency which a government has the legal right to combat.

Saddam and his co-accused are in the dock on charges that they ordered the killing of more than 100,000 Kurds during the brutal 1987-88 Anfal campaign in northern Iraq's Kurdish regions.

They have justified the act as a necessary counter-insurgency operation against Kurdish rebels fighting the then Iraqi government.