BAGHDAD - Two defendants in the second trial of Saddam Hussein testified Tuesday that Iraqi troops had attacked Iranian forces and allied Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq, but had avoided targeting civilians.
"The goal was to fight an organized, armed army, not civilians," said Sultan Hashim al-Tai, who was the commander of Task Force Anfal and head of the Iraqi Army 1st Corps in 1988, when Iran and Iraq were fighting a brutal territorial war.
A prosecution witness, Ali Mostafa Hama, testified how Iraqi warplanes bombed his village with chemicals.
"There was greenish smoke from the bombs. It was as if there was a rotten apple or garlic smell minutes later," he said. "People were vomiting and we were blind and screaming. There was no one to rescue us, just God."
At the start of his trial on charges of genocide on Monday, Saddam insisted he was still the president of Iraq and refused to enter a plea on accusations that he had ordered massacres, deportations and chemical attacks to annihilate the country's Kurdish minority.
Prosecutors said the campaign, called Anfal after a Koranic phrase that means "the spoils of war," killed at least 50,000 Kurds and resulted in the destruction of 2,000 villages.
More than an hour into the first session, they presented grim photographs of mass graves, including one showing the body of a young girl, and cited an order from one of Saddam's top aides telling military commanders to rid villages of "human or even animal presence."
Those efficient and emotional arguments were in marked contrast to the prosecution's performance at the start of Saddam's first trial in October, when the chief prosecutor, Jaafar al-Mousawi, delivered a rambling diatribe and was eventually forced to stop by the chief judge.
The trial has been televised across the Middle East on satellite networks. In the heart of Iraqi Kurdistan, people sat fixated on screens in cafés, homes and offices, watching as the former dictator and some of his most powerful aides faced questions and accusations from black-robed judges.
Survivors of the Anfal campaign organized rallies in several villages. Government offices called for five minutes of silence for the victims before the trial began.
This session was the first time that Saddam and his aides have stood trial for these killings, which have become a lasting legacy of his rule and which President George W. Bush has cited as one of several rationales for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Saddam marched into the wood- railed defendants' pen at 11:45 a.m. wearing a charcoal suit and white shirt, his customary attire for court. He clutched a Koran in one hand.
The prosecutors said the campaign, begun in February 1988 and lasting eight months, was carried out through helicopter and artillery strikes, imprisonment of Kurds in camps and the razing of villages and farmland. Soldiers raped women and separated children from their mothers, they said.
"The only reason Anfal was committed against the Kurds was just because they were Kurds, and it's time for the international community to admit the scale of Anfal," said Munqith al-Faroon, the second prosecutor. Kurds were buried in mass graves in the southern desert near Samawa and by the northern town of Hatra, the prosecutors said.
Sabir al-Douri, the director of Military Intelligence at the time of Anfal, testified that "the Iranian Army and Kurdish rebels were fighting together" against the Iraqi Army and that Anfal aimed to clear northern Iraq of Iranian troops.
He insisted the Iraqi government faced a "tough situation" and had to act because the area where the Iranian-allied guerrillas were located had dams that, if destroyed, would flood Baghdad. He said civilians in the Anfal region had already been removed.
"You will see that we are not guilty and that we defended our country honorably and sincerely," he said.
