“Theoretically, that could happen...One would not expect things to drag out bureaucratically,” the source said, when asked whether Saddam could be convicted and executed rapidly on charges he faces for atrocities against the Shia residents of one town in the early 1980s.

The case is the first involving charges against the former dictator which will go before court.

However, Kurdish politicians are concerned that Mr Hussein not simply be tried and convicted only on this case. They would rather see a broader process embracing other alleged crimes, which they believe would give full exposure of their community's claims of genocide during several decades of Mr Hussein's rule.

Mr Hussein's lawyers in Baghdad said this week that they had received the prosecution's evidence against the former dictator for the alleged atrocities against the inhabitants of Dujayl, a predominantly Shia town northeast of Baghdad.

This was the site of a July 1982 assassination attempt against the former president.

The referral of charges means that a trial could begin as early as mid-September, although pre-trial motions or other administrative concerns may delay it.

All charges against Mr Hussein and his associates have been consolidated into around a dozen cases, each focusing on a specific period and specific place.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal, or IST, formed under US guidance to try those cases, decided to begin with Dujayl, probably because its "limited geographic and temporal scope" make it a "relatively straightforward case" for the prosecution, a former US advisor to the court, Gregg Nivala, said several months ago.

The regime's late 1980s Anfal campaign against the Kurds or its repression of the 1991 Shia uprising reportedly killed tens of thousands of vicitms over large swathes of the country, rather than a few hundred from a single town. However, a quick trial in the Dujayl case - which could be as short as a month - would also satisfy Shia demands for quick justice.

“We insist that this happen without delay,” said Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a prominent Shia preacher who has delivered sermons calling for the former president's swift trial and execution.

Mr Saghir, who also sits in parliament, acknowledged that the death penalty and the fate of Mr Hussein were points of difference between the Shia and Kurdish political blocs.

Iraq's Kurdish leadership, many of whom oppose the death penalty on principle, believe that a lengthy televised trial of Mr Hussein would allow the rest of the country to understand what the Kurds went through under the former regime, one of the underpinnings of their demands for autonomy.

The tribunal process "is also part of the search for truth about part of the political history of Iraq," according to Bakhtiar Amin, a Kurdish human rights activist who served until recently as Iraq's human rights minister.

Rather than seeking vengeance, "We must know what happened," he said.