U.N. Airlifts 83 Foreigners From Strife-Torn Somalia

The United Nations on Friday began airlifting 160 foreigners, including about 20 Americans, out of northern Somalia’s main city, Hargeisa, which rebels reported they overran this week.

Three light aircraft ferried 83 people from Hargeisa to the nearby town of Garowe before the operation stopped because of a curfew, according to the British High Commission in Mogadishu.

The airlift, coordinated by the U.N. Development Program, was to resume today.

There are 25 Britons and about 20 Americans among the 160 foreigners, according to diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity. Most of the foreigners are aid workers.

The Somali National Movement, engaged in a seven-year-old struggle to overthrow the government of Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, said it took Hargeisa on Tuesday and the main port of Berbera a day later.

Diplomats in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, said there was light fighting but that Hargeisa was in government hands.

“Berbera is peaceful but tense,” British diplomats in Mogadishu said in a telex message. “There are no immediate plans for evacuation.”

The government has not commented on the fighting.

Rebel officials, reached by telephone in London and in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, said their forces controlled Hargeisa and were battling soldiers holed up in barracks near the airport, 6 miles outside the town.

Ahmed Mohamed Silanyo, chairman of the rebel movement, said in a telephone interview from London that 20,000 to 30,000 civilians were fighting alongside his forces.