Kunduz hospital airstrike

 Kunduz hospital airstrike (war crime)

Date	3 October 2015
Location	Kunduz,  Afghanistan
Perpetrators	US Air Force
Deaths	42
Injured (non-fatal)	30
Description	On 3 October 2015, an United States Air Force AC-130U gunship machine-gunned a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. At least 42 people were killed and over 30 were injured in the hour-long deliberate attack.

On 3 October 2015, a United States Air Force AC-130U gunship attacked the Kunduz Trauma Centre operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) in the city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.

At least 42 people were killed and over 30 were injured in the deliberate attack. Médecins Sans Frontières condemned the incident, calling it a war crime. It further stated that all warring parties had been notified about the hospital and its operations well in advance. In its first few days of reporting, US corporate media obscured who carried out the strike, despite US/NATO being the only air force around..

Evidence points to a deliberate attempt by US forces to take out suspected targets (unarmed wounded Taliban) within the facility – even if that meant killing all inside the hospital, including civilian patients and medical staff. A broader intent was to destroy the hospital, since it "treated the wounded from all sides of the conflict, a policy that has long irked Afghan security forces,” thus denying its opponents access to medical care.

US military and their Afghan coalition partners in the locality were given clear GPS coordinates of the hospital, the only major facility in and around the remote city of Kunduz. The last forwarded coordinates for the hospital was made on September 29 – the day before the attack – according to the doctors. Even as the airstrike was being carried out, hospital staff made frantic telephone calls to the US forces alerting them of the «mistake», but the bombing and firing continued for at least another 30 minutes.

Official narrative

The US military's first official statement suggested it was a "tragic mistake" committed in the fog of war. An airstrike it carried out in Kunduz “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility.”

After first denying it knew it was a hopstial, the United States military changed story and said the airstrike was carried out to defend U.S. forces on the ground. Later, the United States commander in Afghanistan, General John F. Campbell, said the airstrike was requested by Afghan forces who had come under Taliban fire. Campbell said the attack was "a mistake", and "We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility."

Three investigations of the incident were conducted by NATO, a joint United States-Afghan group, and the United States Department of Defense. The Department of Defense released its findings on 29 April 2016, reaffirming the incident as an accident, and thus it had not committed a war crime.

Facility evacuation and shutdown

The attack made the hospital unusable. All critical patients were referred to other providers, and all MSF staff were evacuated from Kunduz. Before the bombing, the MSF's hospital was the only active medical facility in the area. It has been the only trauma center in northeastern Afghanistan. In 2014, more than 22,000 patients were treated at this emergency trauma center and more than 5,900 surgeries were performed.

Further reading

Glenn Greenwald:The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification

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