Pentagon says Afghan hospital strike caused primarily by human error

“It appears that 30 people were killed and hundreds of thousands of people are denied life-saving care in Kunduz simply because the MSF hospital was the closest large building to an open field and “roughly matched” a description of an intended target”.

The barrage on the hospital lasted 29 minutes before commanders realized the mistake, even as hospital staff members made 18 attempts to call or text USA and Afghan authorities about the attack as it was occurring.

Last month’s deadly bombing to the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, was a mistake caused by human error of the U.S. Military.

So it said General John Campbell, top USA commander in Afghanistan, explaining that the tragedy had been avoidable and it was caused by procedural failures.

The USA military investigators said they found no evidence that the gunship crew knew they were attacking the wrong target.

The report released Wednesday indicates that while some USA officials were aware of the hospital’s location, the gunship crew was not.

United States forces will offer their assistance to MSF in rebuilding the hospital, the only trauma centre in the region, he said.

“We reiterate our (request) that the USA government consent to an independent investigation led by the global Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to establish what happened in Kunduz, how it happened, and why it happened”, Liu added.

The U.S. aircraft had identified the clinic relying on a visual description from Afghan forces and failed to refer to coordinates provided by the charity that showed the clinic was on a “no-strike list”.

The findings also are consistent with Doctors Without Borders’ own investigation, which concluded that the hospital was struck in a “deliberate attack”, though the group continues to demand an independent probe into the incident.

Doctors Without Borders contacted coalition military personnel during the attack to say its facility was “being “bombed” from the air”, and the word was finally relayed to the AC-130 crew, the report said.

Campbell was ultimately in charge during the attack on the hospital, but a military official in Kabul said he was in an aircraft at the time, on his way to testify before Congress on Afghanistan. We take report of civilian casualties seriously. Gen. Wilson Shoffner told reporters the bombing was the result of several human and technical failures.

As the powerful American gunship circled over the densely packed Afghan city of Kunduz on the night of October 3, the crew was flying blind, with little prior intelligence as to where potential Taliban targets were located and without access to key video or electronic communications systems, which were down for much of the mission. The report says it is unclear if the commander on the ground who gave the authorization had the coordinates for the hospital when he ordered the attack.