President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, October 7, 2015.
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The USA has characterized its airstrike Saturday, which killed 12 members of the Doctors Without Borders staff as well as 10 patients, as a mistake.
Separate investigations are being carried out into the incident by the U.S. Department of Defense and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Liu reiterated the group’s call for an independent investigation into what it’s calling a war crime.
Obama also spoke by phone with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to express condolences for the “loss of life” and “commend the bravery of the Afghan national forces”.
Joanne Liu, Doctors Without Borders worldwide president, said in a statement that the organization continues to call on the U.S.to cooperate in an investigation of the incident to find out why it happened.
The general told lawmakers earlier this week that he favored retaining a larger USA military presence in Afghanistan next year than envisioned in current plans, which calls for an embassy-based force by the end of 2016. “The facts and circumstances of this attack must be investigated independently and impartially, particularly given the inconsistencies in the US and Afghan accounts of what happened over recent days”.
“If we let this go, we are basically giving a blank check to any countries at war”. “We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility”, Gen Campbell said, insisting the buildings were “mistakenly struck”.
Campbell also said the United States now has about 9,800 troops in Afghanistan.
That’s not exactly true, according to counterterrorism experts and human-rights groups that keep tabs on civilian casualties in US operations.
White House officials said the president had confidence that the investigative effort now underway, including an inquiry being conducted by the Department of Defense, would be “transparent, it will be thorough, and it will be objective”.
Meanwhile, Guilhem Molinie, MSF’s Afghanistan representative, said during a press conference in Kabul on Thursday that more bodies could be found inside the hospital.
Zafar Hashemi, deputy spokesman for the Afghan president, said his government was committed to a full, transparent investigation and “will fully cooperate with the investigation through appropriate channels agreed upon by our partners” in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Resolute Support mission.
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“This was not just an attack on our hospital, it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions”, Liu said.
