Afghanistan Kunduz MSF Strike Timing

American soldiers and airmen who killed and wounded dozens of civilians in the strike violated USA rules of engagement in a war zone, and have been suspended as they await disciplinary action, military officials said Wednesday.

Investigators also concluded that those who requested the air strike, as well as those who executed it from the air, did not take the proper measures to verify that it was a legitimate military target, Campbell said. But the crew was “fixated on the physical description”, Campbell says, and did not pay attention to the corrected grid coordinates.

Doctors Without Borders has long raised the possibility that the hospital was targeted deliberately.

MSF, or Doctors Without Borders, has demanded an global humanitarian commission to investigate the attack.

The hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) was hit with precise and repeated airstrikes on October 3 for more than a hour, killing 22 people, including children and women.

Shoffner refused to say if the USA probe would be followed by an additional independent global investigation, which MSF has repeatedly called for.

The Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after the U.S. airstrike.

According to the United States investigation, U.S. forces had meant to target a different building in the city and were led off-track by a technical error in their aircraft’s mapping system that initially directed them to an empty field.

“[U.S. forces] did not know the compound was [a Doctors Without Borders] medical centre”.

Campbell said Wednesday the military’s investigation, carried out by officers outside of the command, was “thorough and unbiased”.

Campbell said that he briefed Gen. Philip Breedlove, the top US commander for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani and Afghan Chief Executive Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, on the results of the investigation.

On October 3, a special operations AC-130 gunship fired on the hospital facility for 29 minutes, according to the Pentagon.

The aircraft identified the building based on a visual description provided by Afghan forces, he said, and did not refer to coordinates provided by MSF for inclusion on a “no-strike list”. Believing in that they had earlier been focused by a missile, the crew of the AC-130 pulled eight miles away, a distance in that “degraded the accuracy of certain targeting systems which contributed to the misidentification of the trauma center”, Campbell stated.

A spokesman for Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry said a day after the airstrike that the hospital was attacked because “terrorists” were hiding inside.

“US forces would never intentionally strike a hospital or other protected facilities”, Campbell, the commander of worldwide and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told reporters at North Atlantic Treaty Organisation headquarters in Kabul.