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.”

He added that he wanted to forfeit his retirement benefits.

The money, he said, should go to senior officers who “will need it more than I do.”

In a statement sent to The Washington Post on Sunday, a spokesperson said that the Marine Corps was aware of the video released by Scheller and that it was “taking appropriate action to ensure the safety and well being of Lt. Col. Scheller and his family.”

Scheller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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.”

Urban added that the U.S. military is “deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life.”

The airstrike hit vehicles and a home in a Kabul neighborhood a little more than a mile from the airport. Several civilians, including children, reportedly were killed.

It was unclear how many died in the second U.S. strike on an Islamic State target after last week’s suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport, where people have been gathering in hope of leaving the Taliban-ruled country.

“We are confident we successfully hit the target,” Urban said in a statement earlier Sunday, adding that at the time, the U.S. military had no indications of civilian casualties.

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.

“You just wanted to cry,” she said. “But we also had a job to do.”

The screaming babies, the anguish — it all came back to Aune watching the chaos unfold at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, where thousands of Americans and Afghans have boarded planes bound for anywhere but there.

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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.

“The Marines came by last night at 2:40 in the morning to give us the horrific news,” Schmitz told KMOX.

Schmitz said his son, of Wentzville, Mo., was tireless in his preparation as a Marine.

“This was something he always wanted to do, and I’ve never seen a young man train as hard as he did to be the best soldier he could be,” said Mark Schmitz.

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.

Even under the safest of conditions, deliveries can be dangerous for mother and newborn. The flight briefly stopped in Kuwait as a precaution, then continued to the United Kingdom.

On Aug. 21, another Afghan refugee delivered a baby aboard an evacuation flight. The family named the daughter Reach, for a sign on the aircraft.

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.

“He was a hero,” his brother said.

Merola graduated in 2019 from Los Osos High School, where he enjoyed working on the school’s theater productions.

“I knew Dylan for my most impactful year of high school in theater tech,” his friend Benjamin Gruchy posted on a GoFundMe campaign for Merola’s funeral expenses. “He always showed up with a smile and brought energy to everyone he was with.”

While he dreamed of becoming an engineer and had a passion for technology, Merola enlisted in the service because of his family’s military ties, his grandmother, Clarinda Matsuoka, told the Wall Street Journal.

Two of his great-grandfathers fought in the Korean War. “So, it’s kind of in his blood,” she told the outlet. “He wanted to serve his country. It’s all he talked about in high school.”

When the news of his death surfaced, his sense of duty and sunny disposition were highlighted across the outpouring of tributes and grief.

“My son went to boot camp with him, and said that Dylan always had the biggest smile,” Nancy Alvarado, a military mother, posted on Twitter. “He kept people’s spirits up in the tough moments with that smile.”

— María Luisa Paúl

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.”

A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, told The Post that the strike was carried out with a Hellfire missile a little more than a mile from the airport, which is in a densely packed urban area. The secondary explosion damaged a building, raising the possibility of civilian casualties.

The official said the military assessed that two militants were in the vehicle when it exploded. It is unclear whether the car was rigged to be a bomb or a suicide vest detonated, causing the secondary explosion.

A resident of the neighborhood where the strike occurred and a Taliban official who said he visited the site said in interviews that eight or nine civilians had been killed, including children. Their accounts could not be immediately corroborated.

Photographs of the scene showed two burned-out cars next to a white, two-story house with many of the dwelling’s windows blown out. It was unclear whether both cars were targeted. The resident said in a telephone interview that the dead were all members of one family: three men, a woman and five children. One child had been seriously injured in the strike and later died, he said. Another child’s body was found under a car, he said.

“The family was living normal life. They were not involved in militant activities,” said the man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of his safety.

The Taliban official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said the adults were outside a car when it was struck, but four of the children were inside the vehicle.

Mehrdad reported from Doha, Qatar, and Fahim from Istanbul. Dan Lamothe in Washington contributed to this report.