U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday telephoned the head of Doctors Without Borders, Joanne Liu, to apologize for the USA airstrike on a hospital operated by the organization in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
Advertisement
The attack in the embattled city Saturday killed 12 medical staff members and at least 10 patients, three of them children.
The USA president also pledged full cooperation with the joint investigations into the incident being conducted with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Afghan government.
A personal apology from the president appears to have done little to appease Doctors Without Borders, which continues to call for an independent investigation into the US airstrike that hit one of its hospitals and killed 22 civilians.
“When the United States makes a mistake, we own up to it, we apologize”, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
Mr Obama also called Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, to express his condolences for the innocent lives lost in the strike.
However, Doctors Without Borders urged that more are needed.
“We are continuing to try to contact the [missing] staff. We can not speculate on their whereabouts”, the charity said in a statement on Thursday.
“Even war has rules”, Liu stated. He said Afghan forces fighting to retake Kunduz from the Taliban had requested US air power, and that a USA special operations unit in the “close vicinity” was communicating with the crew of the heavily armed AC-130 gunship that pummeled the hospital.
When the United States air strike began at 2:15 am local time, Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was operating as normal, treating trauma patients from the local area.
Stokes, however, charged that the airstrikes amounted to violations of worldwide humanitarian law and “an attack on the Geneva Conventions itself”.
MSF said that an independent humanitarian commission created under the Geneva Conventions in 1991 should be activated for the first time to handle the inquiry.
MSF says the co-ordinates of the hospital were well-known and its bombing could not have been a mistake.
“Protection of the medical facility is made by the fact that we don’t want to discriminate”, Molinie said.
Advertisement
Obama restated his commitment to a thorough and transparent investigation by the Defense Department, Earnest said.
