The AC-130U plane, circling above in the dark, raked the medical compound with bursts of cannon fire, including high explosive incendiary munitions, for more than an hour.
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Dr. Joanne Liu, the worldwide president of Doctors Without Borders, has demanded an independent investigation led by the global Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission.
Currently, an internal inquiry is being conducted by the United States military and Afghani officials. Similarly, President Obama apologized to the MSF president for the attack, an act that may be perceived as an admission of guilt, or at the very least, an assumption responsibility.
In the days after the city’sSept.
Sad proof is found in the aftermath of our latest setback – the fall of Kunduz to Taliban forces. Our patients burned in their beds, MSF doctors, nurses, and other staff were killed as they worked. We have dropped bombs on wedding receptions, birthday parties and now a hospital.
“The Taliban will soon realise that Ghazni is no Kunduz”.
The Pentagon said that the strike was a mistake and that it was trying to target Taliban insurgents.
MSF officials said such an investigation “would be the most appropriate way to get a full accounting of the facts”.
A few Afghan leaders have suggested that the Taliban had been using the hospital as a base. It resulted in the death of 22 people, including 12 MSF staff.
The strategy in Afghanistan has been to attempt to make the USA appear strong as an imperial force despite being defeated by the poorest people on the planet.
For the IHFFC to be mobilized, a single country would have to call for the fact-finding mission, and the us and Afghanistan-which aren’t signatories-must also give their consent. “Army and police forces made advances and wiped out militants’ pockets in outer sides of the city overnight, killing and injuring dozens of terrorists”, Brigadier General Ghulam Sakhi Ghafoori, a senior commander of Afghan Public Order Police Force, told Xinhua. It took the Los Angeles Times to uncover the 381 pages of findings after a Pentagon investigation into a USA airstrike in Afghanistan that killed a Marine and a Navy medic in 2011. The staff noted that the hospital was the only structure hit in the attack. Bart Janssens, MSF Director of Operations said: “We do not yet have the final casualty figures, but our medical team are providing first aid and treating the injured patients and MSF personnel and accounting for the deceased”.
“They managed to come as close as five kilometres (three miles) to Ghazni city as fierce fighting flared but were quickly pushed back by Afghan forces”. A holdover from the Vietnam War, the plane is a converted transport aircraft loaded with 25mm and 40mm cannons as well as a 105mm howitzer.
Special forces bounce from crisis to crisis.
The hospital, the only one offering traumatology and surgery services in the entire region, was partially destroyed and is now non-operational. “These Conventions govern the rules of war and were established to protect civilians in conflict – including patients, medical workers and facilities”.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon said it would offer “condolence payments” to civilians injured in the air strike and the families of those killed, as well as providing funds for repairing the hospital.
From October to December of 2001 the US bombed the Wazir Akbar Khan Women’s Hospital in Kabul, a hospital in Kandahar, a clinic in Daman district of Kandahar, a military hospital in Herat, two clinics in Uruzgun, a clinic in Paktia, Dand Red Cross clinic in Kandahar, and Mirwais Mina Hospital in Kandahar.
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Another unresolved question is who placed the request for the air support. But we also need a modern day Church Committee answerable to the American public and American values.
