BAGHDAD (AFP) -- Once the most feared man in Iraq, deposed president Saddam Hussein is now fighting for his life in an Iraqi courtroom three years after U.S. 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

Wounded in the leg, Saddam fled abroad but returned four years later and was jailed in 1964. Within two years he had escaped and resumed clandestine work for the Baath party cause.

In 1968, he took part in the coup which brought the party to power, marking the start of his affair with brute force.

As party deputy secretary general and vice president of the all-powerful Revolution Command Council (RCC), he was already considered the real power behind the throne under president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.

Bakr lost his grip over the next decade as Saddam strengthened his own and the president finally retired for health reasons.

The Bakr-Hussein era is considered the golden era of Baath rule, when Saddam showered burgeoning oil funds on schools, hospitals and infrastructure before his ascension to head of state exacerbated his despotic impulses.

Saddam, whose name in Arabic means "He who inspires fear," seized the mantle on July 16, 1979, becoming state president, general secretary of the party and president of the RCC.

The man who once failed to win a place for officer training assumed all the trappings of state, taking the title of field marshal and commander-in-chief of the army.

He brooked no dissent, extending frequent purges of senior figures to family and friends. Those who failed to make it into exile were detained, murdered and buried in the mass graves that have been uncovered across the country since his fall.

Those years after he took absolute power in 1979 saw a modern Arab state reckoned the cradle of civilization transformed into an impoverished pariah, exhausted by war.

Supported in his military adventures when the target was Iran, the tide turned against him in the West after thousands of Kurds were gassed to death in 1988 and he chose to invade Kuwait two years later.

Saddam guided Iraq through the 1980-1988 bloodbath with Iran and the rout of the 1991 Persian Gulf war over Kuwait, emerging each time to claim Pyrrhic victories over the corpses of his people.

The cruelty of the state is amply documented by rights groups.

Informers were encouraged, the media muzzled and few if any dared voice criticism.

Kurds and the country's Shiite majority, who suffered mightily at the hands of his regime, have clamored for Saddam's execution.

The public outcry for his hanging has raised concern among international rights groups about whether the jailed dictator can receive a fair trial in Baghdad.