250 Americans Back Home From Kuwait : Refugees: The freedom flight lands in North Carolina, ending two months of terror in the Persian Gulf.

RALEIGH, N.C. —  About 250 Americans and their dependents returned to the United States on Friday, putting behind them more than two months of terror in Kuwait but leaving many of their loved ones behind.

Also on the flight that landed at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport were seven Canadians, officials said. A total of 103 children and infants were among the passengers, and about half the adults were young men.

“The kids looked great,” said Joe Dean, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, one of many state, federal and voluntary agencies on hand to assist in the repatriation. “Everyone appeared tired but happy to be here.”

Among the first passengers to disembark were two unaccompanied girls, Sara, 6, and Mariam, 4. Their mother, identified only as Connie, from Chicago, was there to greet them, and the three wept and clung to one another in a tiny cluster on the Tarmac. Their husband and father is a Kuwaiti national still stranded in the occupied country.

Connie had left Kuwait on Aug. 1 to visit her father in Chicago for two weeks, leaving the girls with her husband, a senior oil company engineer. Six hours after she arrived in Chicago, Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait.

Connie refused to meet with reporters, but she talked briefly to Dean before rushing to catch a flight back to Illinois with her daughters.

She told Dean that her husband had tried desperately, but to no avail, to get the girls on earlier “freedom flights.”

“He’d like to get out, too, but can’t,” the mother, who appeared to be in her late 20s, was quoted by Dean as saying. He said Connie feels strongly that President Bush should have “sent the Marines in.”

“We’re waiting too long,” she told Dean, readily acknowledging that a U.S. invasion clearly might have cost the lives of her family.

Inside an abandoned terminal, a huge repatriation center was set up, complete with a day-care center equipped with cribs and cots--and a balloon maker who entertained scores of young children. Nearby, some of the mothers were feeding their babies, many of them newborns.

Many of the adults were busy being interviewed by State Department and immigration officials and making travel arrangements to their next destinations. Others lined up to make long-distance telephone calls on free lines that were provided.

Their arrival brings to more than 2,100 the number of American hostages who have been allowed to leave Kuwait. Twenty-two of the passengers boarded the plane during a stop in Baghdad, Iraq, according to the State Department.

All of the returned hostages had endured a long and arduous trip out of Kuwait. Their departure had begun more than 36 hours earlier, after boarding 10 buses in Kuwait city for what State Department officials said should have been a three-hour ride that turned instead into “a 10-hour ordeal.”

Rather than being driven to the airport in Basra, Iraq, as scheduled, the buses took the hostages to a hotel in Kuwait city where, the hostages said, they were subjected to interrogation and harassment by Iraqi security forces brandishing guns.

An unknown number apparently chose to return to their homes in Kuwait instead of proceeding, officials said.

Later, at the Iraq-Kuwait border checkpoint, the hostages again were interrogated for up to three hours.

According to State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, seven hostages were not allowed to board the plane to Baghdad. Once in the Iraqi capital, she said, an American woman with a Jordanian husband and their two children, as well as another American, who was ill, were taken off the plane.

Among the passengers was a Palestinian woman in a wheelchair who said she brought out a 5-year-old boy whose American father had fled alone across the Kuwait desert into Saudi Arabia.

The woman, who brought her own four children here, said she has located the boy’s father and that the father and son would soon be united.

She refused to give his name or her own name. But like a second returned gulf refugee, she said that although the trip out of Kuwait was harrowing, they were not threatened or interrogated by Iraqi soldiers.

Mohammed Issa, 37, a U.S. citizen and a former Marine, agreed, saying that the Iraqis had only ‘tried to break us down mentally’ by making the busloads of passengers sit in the desert for hours on end without food or water.

They both said that, even on the Iraqi Airways flight from Basra to Baghdad, there was little sustenance. Issa said the flight crew charged him and his family $72 for four bottles of juice.

Issa arrived with his wife, 33, and his parents. He said U.S. embassy officials in Kuwait told him that more than 1,000 Americans are still in Kuwait.