IRAQ - Nov 27 - Kurd Witnesses Recount Survival In Shooting Fields.

Two US residents gives harrowing accounts of surviving shooting fields under Saddam Hussain at his resumed trial of genocide against the Kurds. One described the day nearly two decades ago when he watched his mother and sisters being shot to death. "There was a trench. We were lined up. A soldier shot directly at us. I was hit on my shoulder", Taimor Abdullah Rokhzai, 30, told the trial of the deposed Iraqi leader and six former members of his regime, which resumed after a 19-day break. Saddam and his co-defendants have pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from their role in a military crackdown on Iraq's Kurd population in 1987-88. "The soldier kept firing at us. I saw my mother's headscarf fall, my sisters and relatives were bleeding and then they all died", Rokhzai said, recalling his 1988 encounter with Saddam's firing squad as a 12-year-old boy. Saddam listened quietly. Rokhzai now lives in Washington, D.C. Another witness, a former Kurdish guerrilla fighter who now lives in Virginia, described a separate incident involving trenches full of dead people. "Handcuffed and blindfolded, we [Kurdish detainees] were loaded into vehicles and taken to a remote area and dragged out", said Yunis Haji, 37. "I was pushed into a trench and was told to sit there. Suddenly, I was hit in the back. I fell unconscious, and when I woke up again, I pulled myself out of the trench and started running". During the hearing, chief judge Muhammad Oreibi Al Khalifa gave defence lawyers two days to submit a list of witnesses. "You already had 20 days. I will give you two more days. No more and no less", he said.