Planeload of Americans Leaves Iraq : Refugees: Most are women and children evacuated from Kuwait. They may be the last large group to get out.

More than 300 Americans, mainly women and children, were evacuated from Kuwait by way of Baghdad early today, the last large group expected to leave the Iraqi-occupied country.

U.S. diplomats here said that most of the Americans still in Kuwait, estimated at 350 to 400, are men in hiding who would face detention by Iraqi authorities if they emerged.

An additional 350 Americans are in Iraq, almost a third of them men held at strategic sites and labor camps.

“We don’t anticipate any more evacuation flights,” a diplomat said Wednesday.

The group that left today was taken by bus from Kuwait city to the Iraqi port of Basra, then flown out with a stop in Baghdad. The flight was to stop briefly in London, then proceed to Raleigh-Durham airport in North Carolina.

Besides the Americans, a few Japanese, Britons and Canadians were said to be aboard the plane, an Iraqi Airways Boeing 747 chartered by the United States.

The plane has seats for 430 passengers, and some places were expected to be made available for non-Americans qualified to leave. The U.S. Embassy here said it also hoped to send out 41 Americans who had been prevented from boarding the last of the earlier flights because their papers were not in order. These are mostly Arab-Americans, and they have been held at a downtown hotel. (Reuters news agency reported that 22 additional passengers boarded in Baghdad.)

“We’ve probably reached the end on this,” the diplomat said, explaining that those choosing to remain have longstanding ties in Kuwait and Iraq or face detention if they surface.

Many in the group are believed to be children who were born in the United States of third-country parents--a Filipino mother or a Jordanian father, for example. Some were Arab-born American men, another qualified category.

It was the ninth U.S.-chartered flight since President Saddam Hussein agreed to permit foreign women and children to leave Kuwait and Iraq. In mid-September, there were two or three flights a week; the last before today’s was on Sept. 21.

Baghdad-based diplomats had a list of names but no other details on the passengers. They said the group was probably made up mostly of women who had decided to stay on in Kuwait and then changed their minds, or women the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait had been unable to contact earlier.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, the American community there was estimated at 2,500. Hussein at first refused to allow any Westerners to leave, but he then agreed to free women and children.