Baghdad, Iraq ? Sometimes tearfully, sometimes coughing, two Kurdish villagers on Tuesday told an Iraqi court hearing genocide charges against Saddam Hussein that they were poisoned by gas that spewed from planes passing overhead, then were detained for days while suffering from blindness and burns.

Unlike an earlier trial against Saddam, in which witnesses were allowed to remain anonymous out of fear of intimidation, Ali Mostafa Hama and Najiba Khider Ahmed freely confronted the former dictator, describing the day in April 1987 when the air filled with fumes above their villages. The gas reminded them of rotten apples and garlic, they said.

Ahmed, from the northern Kurdish village of Sheik Wasan, talked of fleeing to nearby caves when the planes came. She was detained for nine days and discovered that her 3-year-old son and a nephew had been killed. She returned home to find her village destroyed and livestock dead.

She said the gas attack affected later pregnancies. In the first, her baby was born with skin peeling off. In the second, she miscarried.

“Even Hitler did not do this to his people,” Ahmed said. “Saddam Hussein used to say we were his people. If we were his people, why did he strike us with all those weapons?”

Prosecutors have accused Saddam and six other former Iraqi officials of masterminding what has become known as the Anfal campaign, in which as many as 182,000 civilians were killed in chemical attacks, bombings and detentions in the Kurdish region of Iraq.