MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base”

“This is different from the initial reports which indicated that USA forces were threatened and that the airstrike was called on their behalf”, said Campbell, who said he wanted to correct an initial US statement that the airstrikes were prompted by threats to US forces.

It will renew serious doubts about the limits of cooperation between the USA and the Afghan units that apparently called in the strike, as well as the basic quality of that American-trained force.

MSF reiterated its call for an independent investigation into the incident, though the White House said on Monday it was confident ongoing probes by the US military, NATO, and Afghan security officials would provide a full account of the circumstances surrounding the strike.

U.S. Army Brigadier General Richard Kim is the senior investigator on the incident and is in Kunduz now, Campbell said. “There can be no justifications to attack a hospital and kill patients and medical staff. So, the discrepancy of the descriptions that we’ve had from the United States military reinforce our [request] for an independent and a fully transparent investigation of what has happened”.

“This amounts to an admission of a war crime”. “It only becomes a war crime if it is shown that the target was intentionally attacked”.

“We have now learned that on October 3 Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from USA forces”, Campbell said in a briefing with reporters. It notes that six of the Afghan facilities are actually located in Pakistan, six in Tajikstan, and one in the Mediterranean Sea.

“The hospital was full of patients”. And with the hospital lost to a terrified community, the ghosts of this attack are, again, beyond anyone’s ability to number.

The failure of U.S.-trained Afghan troops and police to swiftly recapture Kunduz is an ominous sign for the government of President Ashraf Ghani and the administration in Washington.

Heading into his final year in office, Obama is weighing whether to go ahead with his plan to bring home nearly all USA troops in Afghanistan next year to honor a political promise to end the wars he inherited.

The medical charity has said that the USA military’s explanation is inadequate in explaining how the hospital – whose Global Positioning System location had been transmitted to military officials – came under a sustained bombardment. No public conclusion of the investigation seems ever to have been issued.

This was a massacre, whether one of carelessness or of hate. Legal experts say it will be hard to prove that a war crime occurred.

Afghan media reports quoted local residents as saying that they heard two blasts.

We should affirm the Afghans’ right to medical care and safety.

The State Department said three separate investigations have been launched in the wake of the attacks and that it was still unclear if it were U.S airstrikes that hit the hospital. Finally, and for the sake of future generations, we should take hold of our runaway empire and make it a nation we can restrain from committing the fathomlessly obscene atrocity that is war.