A Pentagon investigation into a 2015 airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan found that the failures that led to the disaster did not amount to “a war crime” because they were not intentional, Army Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, said Friday.
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“This was an extreme situation” complicated by combat fatigue among USA special operations forces, Votel said.
Leading up to this incident, U Special Operations forces and their Afghan special operations partners had been engaged in intense fighting for several consecutive days and nights in Kunduz, and had repelled heavy and sustained enemy attacks, he noted.
The October 3 incident happened when USA forces inadvertently aimed at the hospital, Gen. John Campbell, the top North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and US commander in Afghanistan, said in November.
The 16 disciplined service members, who were not named, included officers and a two-star general, The Chicago Tribune reports. None face criminal charges for deliberate mass murder.
“The investigation concluded that the personnel involved did not know they were striking a medical facility”.
Although innocent civilians died as a result of the troops “wrong judgement”, Votel said the incident will not be labeled a war crime because the airstrike was not intentional.
“Today’s briefing amounts to an admission of an uncontrolled military operation in a densely populated urban area, during which United States forces failed to follow the basic laws of war”, said MSF President Meinie Nicolai.
“The investigation found that this combination of factors caused both the ground force commander and the air crew to believe mistakenly that the air crew was firing on the intended target, an insurgent-controlled site approximately 400 meters away from the MSF Trauma Center”, the CentCom report said.
He expressed “deepest condolences” to those injured and to the families of those killed. “It is incomprehensible that, under the circumstances described by the USA, the attack was not called off”.
No criminal charges have been leveled against USA military personnel for mistakes that resulted in last’s year’s attack on the civilian hospital in Afghanistan operated by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and other worldwide rights organizations have called for an independent investigation.
Votel said that the trauma center was on a US military no-strike list but that the gunship crew didn’t have access to the list because it launched its mission on short notice and as a result did not have the data loaded into its onboard systems.
In this October, 2015 photo, an Afghan National Army soldier stands guard at the gate of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
A U.S. gunship mistook the hospital at Kunduz, run by Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), for a building that had been seized by Taliban fighters.
“The comprehensive investigation concluded that this tragic incident was caused by a combination of human errors, compounded by process and equipment failures”, Votel said. The investigation had identified 16 service personnel that had “warranted consideration for appropriate administrative or disciplinary action”. No names were released to protect their privacy and, in some cases, because they are still assigned to sensitive or overseas positions. The investigators interviewed 65 witnesses, including personnel at the trauma center and members of USA and Afghan militaries, and reviewed thousands of documents. Six were sent to counseling, two were ordered to return to training, and seven were issued letters of reprimand, which are essentially career-ending. None of the 16 service members have faced court martial. The general officers who conducted the review were brought in from outside Afghanistan, the military said in a statement.
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Hampered by problems with their targeting sensors, the crew relied on a physical description that led them to begin firing at the hospital even though they saw no hostile activity there.
