Campbell said he expected a preliminary report on the incident “very shortly, in the next couple of days”.
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In addition to the USA and Afghans, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation too is carrying out its own investigation into the air strikes at a hospital in Kunduz that resulted in a large number of casualties.
The post Doctors Without Borders calls for transparent investigation of hospital airstrike appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
The Afghan government has been struggling to combat the Taliban since the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation assumed support and training role by the end of 2014, which officially marked the end of their combat mission in the country.
Hamdullah Danishi, the acting governor of Kunduz province, said the MSF hospital was a “Taliban base”.
“MSF is disgusted by the recent statements coming from a few Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack on its hospital in Kunduz”.
“Their description of the attack keeps changing – from collateral damage, to a tragic incident, to now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government”, said Christopher Stokes, general director for MSF. The other 12 were staff members, said MSF.
The hospital was run by Doctors Without Borders, a nonprofit with a reputation for working in a few of the world’s most risky places.
“All the people who were there – and there were up to 180 – either they were patients or staff”. “In the intensive care unit, six patients were burning in their beds”, Lajos Zoltan Jecs, a nurse at the hospital, said in an account posted on the MSF website. Five of the injured staff members were in critical condition.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called the MSF president Monday to express his solidarity and condolences, according to a statement by the French Foreign Ministry.
Speaking during a press conference in Madrid, Carter said, “The president and all the rest of us continue to respond to and adjust to circumstances there and I expect that will continue”.
That argument didn’t cut it for MSF, which strongly denies that the Taliban was holed up inside the complex, and it didn’t cut it for the United Nations, which has referenced the attack as a potential “war crime”.
The airstrike was carried out by an AC-130 gunship, a heavily armed aircraft generally capable of strafing the enemy with precise fire to help ground forces.
Is it ever legal to bomb a hospital?
The charity said that despite frantic calls to military officials in Kabul and Washington, the hospital’s main building was “repeatedly” struck for more than an hour. The Taliban captured the city earlier this month, but Afghan forces retook it after several days.
JUDY WOODRUFF: That was General John Campbell, US commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, pledging the facts will come out about Friday’s deadly attack.
The city’s civilian residents have been caught in the heavy fighting.
MSF said another 30 people were missing after the incident. A few 105 patients and 80 staff were in the hospital at the time of the attack.
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He criticised the Taliban for fighting from within urban areas and putting civilians at risk.
