President Obama issued an unusual apology in a telephone call yesterday to Dr. Joanne Liu, the worldwide president of the NGO Doctors Without Borders, for the USA bombing of its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
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Obama also spoke to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to convey condolences and pledge continued cooperation, the White House said.
“When we make a mistake we own up to it”, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said.
Mr Earnest said a U.S. investigation would “provide a transparent, thorough and objective accounting of the facts and circumstances of the incident”.
US President Barack Obama has apologised to both Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the Afghanistan government for striking trauma centre in Kunduz on Saturday.
Twenty-two people were killed in the attack, and dozens wounded in the bombing. MSF believe that the strike was a war crime and approached the US, Afghanistan and other nations with a request to investigate the matter.
Thirty-three people remain unaccounted for after a deadly weekend US airstrike hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the organization said Thursday.
“This was not just an attack on our hospital, it was an attack on the Geneva conventions”, Liu said earlier on Wednesday.
Among the claims made since the strike was that US or Afghan troops may have felt threatened by Taliban fighters who were shooting at them from around the hospital, though that has not yet been confirmed.
He pressed for an independent worldwide investigation by the global Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, an global body that investigates potential breaches of worldwide humanitarian law.
So far the White House has failed to offer support for an independent investigation.
MSF said statements from the Afghan and USA forces implied they worked together to deliberately target the hospital, which amounts to an admission of a war crime. “Our colleagues had to operate on each other”, Dr Liu said of the chaos.
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MSF wants to mobilise the global Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, based in the Swiss capital of Bern. That commission, set up in 1961 under the Geneva Conventions to investigate human rights violations, has never previously been used.
