Calling the strike a “tragic mistake”, the top U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation commander in Afghanistan, General John F. Campbell, said those responsible would be punished.
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U.S. forces who launched a deadly air strike on an Afghan hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) had meant to attack a nearby Taliban-controlled compound, and the mistake was caused by human and technical error, according to the USA forces commander.
The raid killed 30 people and forced the charity to close the trauma centre – the only one in the region – while stirring an avalanche of global condemnation.
“It is shocking that an attack can be carried out when U.S. forces have neither eyes on a target nor access to a no-strike list, and have malfunctioning communications systems”, expressed MSF’s Stokes, while also saying that the tragedy demonstrated a “gross negligence” from the U.S. Forces.
“We reiterate our (request) that the USA government consent to an independent investigation led by the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to establish what happened in Kunduz, how it happened, and why it happened”, Liu added.
Campbell acknowledged that MSF had informed US operational headquarters in Afghanistan about the coordinates of the medical facility and the military saved it to a no airstrike list five days before the bombing.
Campbell’s spokesperson Wilson Shoffner refused to say if the U.S. probe would be followed by an independent worldwide investigation.
The US military said it would offer to help rebuild the hospital. Shoffner said. The officials stated that the crew of an AC-130 gunship was sent to attack a Taliban command center in a different building, but problems with targeting sensors caused the crew to fire on the hospital despite a lack of hostile activity. “They believed they were striking a building located several hundred meters away taken over by insurgents”, he said, adding that “Those who called and conducted the strike did not take procedures to verify this was a legitimate target”. Most of the victims of the attack were either MSF staff or patients. But “the crew remained fixated” on the hospital and did not rely on the grid location system, Campbell said. But when they entered them into the degraded systems, they correlated to an open field 300 metres (1,000 feet) from the target.
The U.S. military also reportedly released a summary of the findings of their investigation to the public. Shortly after the bombing, it was reported that Doctors Without Borders would be leaving the city of Kunduz as a result of the bombing.
The reports detail a chaotic 25-minute period where planes fired 211 shells at the hospital before commanders realized a mistake had been made.
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The timeline detailed by the U.S. military indicated that the 29-minute-long strike began at 2.08am.
