Military carries out strike in Kabul as slain service members are returned to U.S.

Marine Corps Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who was relieved of command after a video of him criticizing senior U.S. officials for “failures” in Afghanistan went viral, announced Sunday that he will be leaving the Marine Corps after 17 years.

“All I asked for was accountability of my senior leaders when there are clear, obvious mistakes that were made,” he said in a video posted on LinkedIn this weekend.

“I am not saying we can take back what has been done; all I asked for was accountability,” he said.

Scheller said leaders accepting accountability for a harried U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan could have a more significant effect on service members “with post-traumatic stress or struggling with purpose” than any other “piece of paper or message.”

Amid reports of civilian deaths after a U.S. military airstrike on a car in an urban Kabul area Sunday, the U.S. military acknowledged those potential casualties.

“We know that there were substantial and powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of the vehicle, indicating a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties,” Navy Capt. Bill Urban said in a statement Sunday evening. “It is unclear what may have happened, and we are investigating further.”

Readers have been asking: How did the number of estimated Americans in Afghanistan shrink so dramatically in a week? On Aug. 17, State Department officials told Congress it was as many as 15,000. Then, eight days later, the number had dwindled to 6,000, based on an analysis starting Aug. 14.

The vast difference has led to questions. Here’s an explanation, via an interview with a senior State Department official.

The first number — 15,000 — was a “very, very rough estimate” largely based on the number of people who had registered with the State Department as being in Afghanistan. There is no requirement for Americans to register overseas when they travel — few people do — but odds are higher in a war-torn country such as Afghanistan. So that was the starting point for figuring out how many Americans were in the country.

It was early April 1975 in Saigon, the final days of the South Vietnamese collapse in a ruinous war, and crying women were handing orphaned babies to Regina Aune.

Aune, a 30-year-old Air Force flight nurse, had just landed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base as part of Operation Babylift, a mission ordered by President Gerald Ford to evacuate thousands of orphans before Saigon fell.

“It was just total chaos,” Aune recalled in an interview. “There was so much desperation.”

Aune took one baby after another onto a military cargo plane, their caretakers wailing as the children disappeared into the fuselage and a new life.

Mark Schmitz, father of Jared Schmitz, 20, confirmed his son’s death in a brief Friday phone call with The Washington Post. He said his son had been a Marine since 2019.

Earlier that day, he told St. Louis radio station KMOX that his son, who was on his first deployment, had always wanted to serve his country in the military.

“His life meant so much more. I’m so incredibly devastated that I won’t be able to see the man that he was very quickly growing into becoming,” Mark Schmitz told the radio station. He said he was informed of his son’s death after a middle-of-the-night knock on the door.

Wrapped in a pink hat and blanket, Saman Noori’s newborn, Havva, could have little inkling of her family’s harrowing escape to safety just before her birth.

The baby, born Saturday, was delivered on a Turkish Airlines flight from Dubai to Birmingham in the United Kingdom as part of the mass evacuation of civilians amid the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. The flight included Afghans who have worked for the U.K. government.

Noori, 26, went into labor at about 33,000 feet and delivered Havva, whose name in English translates to Eve, without any doctor on the plane. Instead, the crew helped deliver the child above Kuwait’s airspace. Mother and daughter reportedly are in good health, the BBC reported.

Whether he was undergoing a grueling Marines boot camp or spending time with his family, Dylan Merola, 20, did everything with his signature smile, his older brother, David Merola, told The Washington Post.

“He has always been a helpful kid, never meeting a stranger,” he said.

Merola, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., was on his first overseas tour as a Marine and was a few weeks shy of returning home when he was killed in Kabul. At the time of the explosion, Merola was aiding efforts to evacuate children.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Unconfirmed reports of civilian casualties began to circulate on Afghan media outlets within hours of the U.S. strike Sunday.

Shortly after the strike, a Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said that early reports indicated “a vehicle was hit by the Americans,” killing one person, and that a rocket attack hit a house. He did not immediately respond to questions about whether civilians had been harmed. The New York Times quoted him Sunday as saying that civilians had suffered casualties and that the Taliban was “investigating the reason of the airstrike and the exact number of casualties.”