Special report: Saddam Hussein's Fate

    BAGHDAD, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- The trial of the ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and six codefendants on genocide charges against Iraq's Kurdish minority in 1980s resumed in Baghdad on Monday.

    Chief prosecution Munqith al-Faroun begun the session with presenting documents from the Iraqi army and intelligence recommending the use of chemical weapons during the Operation Anfal (Spoils of War) as more effective approach to destroy the Kurdish guerrilla.

    Saddam and six of his aides are facing charges of genocide against Kurds in the trial of Operation Anfal, in which prosecutors said that up to 180,000 Kurds were killed, many of them by poison gas and mass killings.

    If convicted, Saddam could get his second death penalty following the first one he got from the trial of Dujail.

    On Nov. 5, a panel of five Iraqi judges sentenced Saddam, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar to death by hanging for killing of 148 people after a failed assassination attempt against Saddam in the town ofDujail, some 60 km north of Baghdad.