AMERICANS ARE EVACUATED FROM SOMALIA : AFRICA: U.S. helicopters take them and other foreigners to ships off shore. Italian planes join in rescuing hundreds imperiled by civil war.

The United States and Italy evacuated hundreds of foreigners Saturday from Somalia’s capital, including all Americans, but officials in Rome later said they had halted their rescue because of renewed fighting in the civil war.

The Somali rebels, updating earlier figures, said a week of fighting there has killed 1,500 people.

American helicopters and ground troops evacuated more than 200 people from the capital, Mogadishu, to ships off shore, the State Department said in Washington.

Among them were the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors and a number of diplomatic personnel from both nations.

A State Department official said all Americans in Somalia were evacuated, along with people from more than 15 different nations.

The official, who declined to be identified by name, noted that the rescue would have to be resumed today. However, subsequent flights Saturday were successful in completing the operation.

Marine CH-53 helicopters from the amphibious craft Trenton flew to the U.S. Embassy compound in Mogadishu and ferried the evacuees to American ships off the coast, part of the U.S. armada in the Persian Gulf region.

Sources in Kenya said they would probably be taken to the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

A small group of Marines from the Trenton and the amphibious assault ship Guam were flown into Mogadishu to assist in the evacuation, the State Department said.

“Their mission is solely to assist in the rapid and peaceful departure of Americans from Somalia,” It said as the operation was under way. “They are not involved in any way in the conflict there.”

Italy said it was forced to halt its operation late Saturday when clashes resumed in Mogadishu, despite pledges by rebels of the United Somali Congress to cease fire until all foreigners had left.

The Italian Foreign Ministry did not describe the scale of the fighting. But it said two planes hoping to complete the evacuation did not reach Mogadishu and were forced to return to Mombasa.

Earlier, two Italian C-130 cargo planes carried 189 foreigners, mostly Italians, from the capital to Mombasa, the ministry said.

An estimated 500 foreigners, including between 70 and 80 American diplomats and citizens, had been stuck in the Somali capital all week.

A United Somali Congress rebel spokesman on Saturday raised the estimate of the death toll in the fighting from 500 to 1,500 and said up to 4,500 people have been wounded. The government has not given a death toll.

The rebel group also claimed to have bolstered its troops with 10,000 reinforcements.

In another development, about eight Somali military personnel and about 100 women and children also fled to Nairobi on Saturday and were being kept on their airplane at the international airport under guard by Kenyan a paramilitary forces, according to Kenya’s foreign minister, Ndolo Ayah. Kenyan officials were meeting to discuss the fate of those aboard, he said.

Their flight from the turmoil would suggest a further weakening of President Mohamed Siad Barre’s 21-year grip on the Horn of Africa nation of 8 million.

The president, who has maneuvered the country through shifting alliances with the Soviets and the United States during his rule, has been accused of widespread atrocities. He took power in a 1969 coup.

The United States had been the primary backer of Siad Barre since the late 1970s, but it cut nearly all of its aid in recent years following increasing reports of human rights abuses under Siad Barre.

From the late 1970s through the end of the Cold War, Somalia was viewed as a strategic ally against Soviet expansion in Africa and along the Red Sea.