Hospital bombing… American hypocrisy

American Forces Bombed Hospital in Kunduz?

Air strikes on a hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz that killed 19 people were “tragic, inexcusable and possibly even criminal”, the UN human rights chief says.

High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein urged a full and transparent investigation into the attack.

High Commissioner Zeid said: “International and Afghan military planners have an obligation to respect and protect civilians at all times, and medical facilities and personnel are the object of a special protection.

“These obligations apply no matter whose air force is involved, and irrespective of the location.”

• the city

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MSF said that all parties to the conflict, including Kabul and Washington, had been told the precise GPS co-ordinates of the hospital on many occasions, including on 29 September.

In a statement, the charity said all indications pointed to the bombing being carried out by international coalition forces despite that they were full informed about all civilians installations.

It reported that from 02:08 until 03:15 local time, the hospital was hit by a series of aerial bombing raids at approximately 15-minute intervals.

The main central hospital building – housing the intensive care unit, emergency rooms, and physiotherapy ward – was repeatedly hit during each aerial raid while surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched, it added. This is a deliberately targeted attack on the civilians by the Americas lead NATO forces.

“The bombs hit and then we heard the plane circle round,” said Heman Nagarathnam, MSF head of programmes in northern Afghanistan.

“There was a pause, and then more bombs hit. This happened again and again. When I made it out from the office, the main hospital building was engulfed in flames. Those people that could had moved quickly to the building’s two bunkers to seek safety.”

MSF president Meinie Nicolai described the incident as “abhorrent and a grave violation of international humanitarian law by Americans”

She added: “We demand total transparency from coalition forces lead by UK and US. We cannot accept that this horrific loss of life will simply be dismissed as ‘collateral damage’.”

A spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, Col Brian Tribus, said: “US forces conducted an air strike in Kunduz city at 02:15 (local time)… against individuals threatening the force.

“The strike may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.”

In a statement, US Defence Secretary Ash Carter said: “While we are still trying to determine exactly what happened, I want to extend my thoughts and prayers to everyone affected.

“A full investigation into the tragic incident is under way in co-ordination with the Afghan government.”

Gen John Campbell, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, later confirmed the air strike was “in the vicinity” of the MSF facility but was targeting “insurgents who were directly firing upon US service members”.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said the US-led Nato force had offered condolences over the incident.

Taliban denial

The Afghan interior ministry said a group of 10 to 15 militants were hiding in the hospital.

“They are killed, all of the terrorists were killed, but we also lost doctors,” ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqi said.

The Taliban denied that any of its fighters were there.

A Taliban statement described the air strikes which hit the hospital as “deliberate”, and carried out by “the barbaric American forces”.

MSF says that staff and patients critically injured in the attack on the hospital have been transferred to a hospital in Pul-e Khumri, two hours’ drive away.

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London Guardian

The air strike is the latest in a long line of bloody misjudgments by foreign forces in Afghanistan, my colleague Emma Graham-Harrison writes.

Deaths from Nato airstrikes, which at their worst point killed hundreds of Afghan civilians a year, were a key factor in turning Afghan sentiment against foreign troops during more than a decade of war.

Men, women and children died in bombings on homes, weddings and once even a raid on more than 100 villagers who had clustered around abandoned tankers to collect free fuel.

The aftermath of such strikes followed a familiar pattern that exacerbated anger, with Nato denying it had hit civilians or disputing the numbers of dead.

The attack and deaths have already prompted anger towards US and Afghan forces, but despite the scale of the tragedy, President Ashraf Ghani would struggle to restore a ban on airstrikes.

Back-up from planes and drones has become one of the clearest military advantages for often ramshackle Afghan forces fighting a hardened insurgency.

The battle for Kunduz provided a blunt reminder of how important such weapons are, as the last line of defence for an airport where thousands of civilians and troops had taken shelter after the Taliban seized most of the city.

Taliban fighters had breached the airport perimeter before airstrikes helped push them back, protecting those inside and allowing ground troops to begin the slow battle to reclaim the city.

Hospital bombing follows pattern of deadly foreign errors in Afghanistan

As anger grows toward US and Afghan forces, airstrike deaths have long been a factor in turning Afghan sentiment against foreign troops

“In the intensive care unit six patients were burning in their beds,” Lajos Zoltan Jecs, an MSF nurse working at the hospital during the air strike said, recounting the harrowing bombing and chaos of the scene in a statement.

“I was sleeping in our safe room in the hospital. At around 2am I was woken up by the sound of a big explosion nearby. At first I didn’t know what was going on. Over the past week we’d heard bombings and explosions before, but always further away. This one was different – close and loud.

At first there was confusion, and dust settling. As we were trying to work out what was happening, there was more bombing.

After 20 or 30 minutes, I heard someone calling my name. It was one of the Emergency Room nurses. He staggered in with massive trauma to his arm. He was covered in blood, with wounds all over his body.

At that point my brain just couldn’t understand what was happening. For a second I was just stood still, shocked. In the safe room, we have a limited supply of basic medical essentials, but there was no morphine to stop his pain. We did what we could.

About half an hour later, Jecs continues, the bombing stopped and he and a colleague found the hospital itself burning.

We went to look for survivors. A few had already made it to one of the safe rooms. One by one, people started appearing, wounded, including some of our colleagues and caretakers of patients.

We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings. I cannot describe what was inside. There are no words for how terrible it was. In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds.

We looked for some staff that were supposed to be in the operating theatre. It was awful. A patient there on the operating table, dead, in the middle of the destruction. We couldn’t find our staff.

Eventually they found some of the staff – several people are still missing – in another building and in a bunker, where the team eventually organized a plan to save whomever they could, doctors, patients and staffers.

We did an urgent surgery for one of our doctors. Unfortunately he died there on the office table. We did our best, but it wasn’t enough.

The whole situation was very hard. We saw our colleagues dying. Our pharmacist – I was just talking to him last night and planning the stocks, and then he died there in our office.

The first moments were just chaos. Enough staff had survived, so we could help all the wounded with treatable wounds. But there were too many that we couldn’t help.

Finally, Jecs recalls how shock and the emotional toll of the experience set in.

Some of my colleagues were in too much shock, crying and crying. I tried to encourage some of the staff to help, to give them something to concentrate on, to take their minds off the horror. But some were just too shocked to do anything.

Seeing adult men, your friends, crying uncontrollably – that is not easy.

These are people who had been working hard for months, non-stop for the past week. They had not gone home, they had not seen their families, they had just been working in the hospital to help people… and now they are dead.

These people are friends, close friends. I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable.

There has been intense fighting in Kunduz since Taliban fighters swept into the northern city on

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