Baghdad: Once the most feared man in Iraq, deposed president Saddam Hussein is now fighting for his life in an Iraqi courtroom three years after US troops toppled his regime.
Saddam, whose name has elicited comparisons to Hitler and Stalin, sits in the dock for the execution of 148 Shiite men from the village of Dujail after a failed attempt on his life in 1982.
Ironically, his trial for crimes against humanity has given him a shot at redemption with his hardcore supporters after fleeing Baghdad in April 2003 and breaking his vow to fight the Americans to the bitter end.
The US-led invasion was triggered by suspicions over Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, which the former strongman knew was non-existent but which he kept shrouded in mystery because of his fears about Iran and Israel.
The magnetic strongman, who faces a possible sentence of death by hanging, has used his trial's televised proceedings to cast ridicule on the invasion and the legitimacy of the US occupation that ended his 24-year presidential reign.
Dressed elegantly in a black suit, gone is the paunch of his final years of decadent rule that saw him squander Iraq's lavish oil wealth on palaces while his once mighty military atrophied and finally collapsed during the 2003 war.
Hardened by prison life and his time on the run, a gaunt Saddam has simultaneously captivated and repelled his former subjects, with his grand standing and dramatic outbursts against the American presence in Iraq.
"It (the trial) is a comedy against Saddam Hussein and his comrades," Saddam bellowed at the start of his testimony in the trial's latest session Thursday.
"I call on the people to start resisting the invaders instead of killing each other," Saddam thundered before the court's Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman closed the hearing, robbing the ex-president of his pulpit.
The fugitive dictator was disgraced by images of his December 2003 capture which showed a dazed man with sprawling hair, surrendering to US troops and being checked for lice after being hauled from a fox hole on a rural farm.
His surrender was a giant reversal of fortune for the 68-year-old Arab nationalist whose rise and fall have been in epic in scope, from his fatherless boyhood in a mud hut village to his bloody, conspiratorial climb to power.
He first made a name trying to murder Iraqi leader Abdul Karim Kassem in 1959.
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