DUJAIL, Iraq — The scars of what happened after an assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein, on July 8, 1982, are painfully evident in this mainly Shiite town 35 miles north of Baghdad.

People lower their voices when they speak of fathers, brothers and sons who went to the gallows, their fates unknown until Saddam's overthrow 21 years later set off the ransacking of a secret-police headquarters in Baghdad that uncovered official records of the executions. The barren landscape around Dujail is stark testament to the bulldozing of thousands of acres of date palms and fruit orchards after plotters fired on Saddam's convoy from thickets on the edge of town.

Now, the events at Dujail have come full cycle for Saddam.

Officials at the Iraqi Special Tribunal set up to try the former dictator and his top aides have said they expect to put him on trial before the end of the year in the deaths of nearly 160 men and boys from Dujail, all Shiites, some in their early teens. Some were shot dead in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, but 143 — nine of them between the ages of 13 and 15 — were executed three years later by Saddam's revolutionary court.

Townspeople say that many others remain missing — at least 200, by some counts — and that they hope the trial will reveal at least something of their fate.

For now, their families have only fading photographs of their lost men and boys at weddings, school graduations and summer outings, and tales of the moments they disappeared, seized on the streets or pulled from their homes by secret-police squads that descended on Dujail in the days after the attack on Saddam.

The prospect of seeing Saddam, 68, facing a possible death sentence has brought relief — at least to the three-quarters of the population who are Shiites, though not to many in the Sunni Arab minority in the town, where there are still fierce loyalties to Saddam.

"Having Saddam on trial for what he did here will be good for Dujail, and for all of Iraq, because many people in this country, and in Dujail, still think of him as some kind of a god," said Ali Haj Hussein, 37, a Shiite who lost seven brothers in the executions that followed the assassination attempt, including one, Hussein, 19, who confessed to his father before he died that he was one of those who shot at the Iraqi ruler.

For Saddam, the visit to Dujail amounted to a venture into enemy territory. Many in the city of about 75,000 despised him for starting a war with Iran, Iraq's Shiite neighbor, two years earlier. Shiites say Saddam distrusted the presence of a Shiite enclave, including Dujail and the neighboring town of Balad, deep inside Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland — and beside the main highway from Baghdad to Tikrit, Saddam's hometown.

A conservative Shiite religious party, Dawa, with an armed wing that had opened terrorist attacks on Saddam's government, had strong support in Dujail, and saw in his visit a chance to avenge the regime's killings of hundreds of Dawa leaders and sympathizers.

Another crime for which Saddam is likely to face trial is the Anfal campaign — the Arabic word means "spoils" — of the late 1980s, in which as many as 150,000 Kurds were killed, many shot and dumped into mass graves, others killed by poison gas. The chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja in March 1988 that killed an estimated 5,000 is likely to be treated as a separate case, like Dujail. Other crimes include the repression of a Shiite rebellion in southern Iraq in 1991, in which 150,000 people are believed to have been killed.

But the Dujail trial will set the pattern for the others, and lawyers for Saddam have made it clear they plan to expose the proceedings as a show trial manipulated by U.S. lawyers who run the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, a U.S. Embassy agency that has been the legal and financial mainstay of the special tribunal.

"All over the world, people know Saddam Hussein as the man who said 'No!' to America, and it will be so in court," said Ziad Najdawi, a Jordanian who is part of an international team of lawyers assembled to aid Saddam's defense.

"They can talk as they want, about executions and chemical weapons and mass graves, but we will say, 'It is all lies, nothing but lies, everything here is tainted by America.' "

On the summer afternoon 23 years ago when Saddam came to Dujail, he was greeted with gunfire from the palm groves on the north side of town, survivors say.

But he outwitted the plotters. When leaders made a gift of a car to Saddam, marking it, in tribal tradition, with hands dipped in the blood of slaughtered sheep, Saddam insisted the tribal leaders travel in the car themselves — to their deaths, as the accounts have it, when the plotters fired on it.