Some in military suspended for deadly Afghan hospital attack

Doctors Without Borders, which is known by its French acronym MSF, said in a report earlier this month that it had found no military justification for the United States bombing of its hospital in northern Afghanistan that killed 30 of its patients and staff. Realizing that was not correct, the crew on the gunship then made a decision to target the Doctors Without Borders hospital as the nearest building to the target coordinates that matched the description of the intended target.

“The medical facility was misidentified as a target by US personnel who believed they were striking a different building several hundred meters away where there were reports of combatants”, said John Campbell, commander of USA forces in Afghanistan, in a Pentagon briefing from Afghanistan.

Doctors Without Borders called USA military personnel at Bagram at 2:20 a.m.to tell them the hospital was under attack.

While there will be consequences for the deadly miscalculations, it means little for Doctors Without Borders, however, who declared the airstrike was a “war crime”.

“It is shocking that an attack can be carried out when USA forces have neither eyes on a target nor access to a no-strike list, and have malfunctioning communications systems”, he said. They followed all procedures in order to let the USA government know, on several occasions, that this building was their hospital and that it housed no threat. But once again partially due to equipment failure, the information wasn’t relayed to the AC-130 gunship for another seventeen minutes, by which time the strike was finished, and thirty patients and staff were dead.

In a statement, MSF general director Christopher Stokes said that “the U.S. version of events presented today leaves MSF with more questions than answers”.

MSF has called for the global Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) – an independent body created under worldwide law but which has never been used – to investigate the attack.

According to Campbell, MSF on September 29 sent the coordinates of its Afghan facility in Kunduz to multiple recipients within the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation chains of command. The navigation and targeting system was offline for part of the flight, but came online just after the strike began.

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

“It took the headquarters and the U.S. special operations commander until 2.37am to realise the fatal mistake”, he said.

“It also identified failures in systems and processes that, while not the cause of the strike on the MSF trauma centre, contributed to the incident”.

It has offered to help rebuild the hospital and offered condolences for the families of the victims, and vowed to learn from what it says was a tragic mistake.