12 MSF staff and 10 patients
The Guardian reports that the US keeps changing its story on how we happened to bomb that MSF hospital in Kunduz.
US special operations forces – not their Afghan allies – called in the deadly airstrike on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, the US commander has conceded.
Shortly before General John Campbell, the commander of the US and Nato war in Afghanistan, testified to a Senate panel, the president of Doctors Without Borders – also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – said the US and Afghanistanhad made an “admission of a war crime”.
Shifting the US account of the Saturday morning airstrike for the fourth time in as many days, Campbell reiterated that Afghan forces had requested US air cover after being engaged in a “tenacious fight” to retake the northern city of Kunduz from the Taliban. But, modifying the account he gave at a press conference on Monday, Campbell said those Afghan forces had not directly communicated with the US pilots of an AC-130 gunship overhead.
So, what, then – the pilots read their minds? Made a wild guess?
The airstrike on the hospital is among the worst and most visible cases of civilian deaths caused by US forces during the 14-year Afghanistan war that Barack Obama has declared all but over. It killed 12 MSF staff and 10 patients, who had sought medical treatment after the Taliban overran Kunduz last weekend. Three children died in the airstrike that came in multiple waves and burned patients alive in their beds.
On Tuesday, MSF denounced Campbell’s press conference as an attempt to shift blame to the Afghans.
22 people killed – 12 more than were killed in Roseburg.
I don’t think saying the Afghans didn’t communicate directly with the gunship counts as “modifying the account”. Most people would understand that a request from the Afghans would likely go to a US liaison officer whose duty it was to evaluate the target and then communicate with the gunship. We need to know much more about what was said by all those people.
And, of course, we need to know their rules of engagement. And the unofficial culture – for instance, how likely were US personnel to accept Afghan requests without checking? I suspect that only an independent inquiry will get at the facts.
I suspect that only an independent inquiry will get at the facts.
Heh. Who would this “independent” body be ?
Why on earth do we need to “know” any of this before condemning the actions?
Whatever the “rules of engagement” the USA and their military operate by, they are in blatant violation of the Geneva convention and basic human decency. They have been repeatedly blatantly violating the Geneva convention and basic human decency. The USA needs to take full responsibility for what their military has done, and has been doing, and then go ahead and bloody well check themselves and their actions. They are not the Good Guys, they are not White Hats, they are just another bully in a playground teeming with them.
What the US military did in Kunduz was wrong, they were told what they were doing at the bloody time it was happening, and they bloody well kept doing it anyway.
The US military on behalf of the USA and its citizenry perpetually keep doing “wrong” things, have been repeatedly told that what they’re doing is “wrong”, and they keep doing those and similar things anyway, brushing away criticisms with easy catch phrases.
Here’s hoping MSF keeps their feet to the fire.
MSF have said, and I have not heard a US spokesperson deny it, that they informed all waring parties of the location if the hospital.
So whoever requested the air support should have known there was a hospital in the vicinity, and the crew of the aircraft should have known. That means there were at least two (if it was a direct Afghan request) and maybe three (if US personal requested the strike on behalf of the Afghans) to recognise the danger to the hospital.
What needs to be determined is whether the location of the hospital was passed on to those who needed to know.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time we’ve bombed a hospital. It apparently was rather normal in Vietnam, and I’m pretty sure there have been other cases in Afghanistan, but it’s hard to find specifics on Google with all the news covering this one; I don’t know how far back I’d have to go to get past that, and I don’t have enough minutes on my work break!
One article I found, though, suggests this is routine. Bombing hospitals (and weddings) may be just part of SOP for the US military. Accident or no, it definitely needs to be dealt with under international law. It reminds me of Trump saying if he becomes president, he will just go in and take the oil from the Middle East without any limits of international law. He gets cheered for this. Anyone who doesn’t condemn such behavior is themselves complicit with criminal behavior.
How many doctors and patients were killed by Allied bombing in the Normandy landing?
War is an unbearably terrible thing, and the number of people, combatants and others, who die by accident and error is part of the price of military solutions to social/political/religious problems.
JtD, that may be true. It is also true that the Normandy landing represented a large scale full on war fought between large armies in a chaotic environment with indiscriminate weapons and little to no effective battlefield communication.
MSF had provided the GPS co-ordinates of their hospital to both the US military and the Afghan Government and, we are repeatedly told, the US military has incredibly precise weapons and the best battlefield communications that exist.
While I’m sure all fighting is chaotic, in the scale of the Normandy landings this was a minor disturbance. I don’t think it is helpful to minimise one by comparison to the other. The points of difference are vast.