US special operations analysts were collecting intelligence on the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan in the days before the facility was shelled by the US Army.
American operatives thought the MSF facility was being used by a Pakistani agent allied with the Taliban, the Associated Press reported on Thursday.
“The special operations analysts had assembled a dossier that included maps with the hospital circled, along with indications that intelligence agencies were tracking the location of the Pakistani operative and activity reports based on overhead surveillance,” the AP stated.
It stressed that the special operations unit was aware that the facility it was targeting for surveillance was a “protected medical site.”
The AP based its report on “a former intelligence official familiar with the material.”
The revelation adds to, but does not fully confirm, doubts about the US military’s claims—that it was not targeting the MSF facility.
As the AP pointed out, on the same day that commander of US troops in Afghanistan Gen. John Campbell said in congressional testimony that “we would never intentionally target a protected military facility,” he also noted the presence of a special operations unit “in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires.”
The day before—two days after the Oct. 3 attack–Campbell had said US forces were targeting Taliban fighters, in response to an plea from their Afghan allies, and accused the fundamentalist militants of “purposefully placing civilians in harm’s way.” He still called the US attack a mistake.
MSF representatives have described US and Afghan claims about the Taliban’s presence in the Kunduz facility as “an admission of a war crime.” The organization responded to the AP’s Thursday story by saying it suggests “the hospital was intentionally targeted.”
“This would amount to a premeditated massacre,” MSF executive Meinie Nicolae told the wire service, reiterating calls for an independent investigation. Currently, the bombing is being probed by the Department of Defense, NATO, and the Afghan government.
President Obama has apologized to MSF for the attack, but not everyone in Washington appears to consider this to have been the right move.
“Is there anyone at root to blame for this incident other than the Taliban for going into a civilian area and fighting among civilian targets?” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Gen. Campbell a few days after the incident at the aforementioned congressional hearing, before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Campbell declined to answer.
Last summer, during Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, some State Department officials defended the Israeli government’s shelling of protected facilities by making statements similar to Cotton’s.
In response to a question that referenced an Israeli attack on a Palestinian hospital, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Hamas “uses the Palestinian people as human shields, wrapping them around its weapons and strategic sites.”
In response to a query on mainstream reports casting doubt on Israeli claims about Palestinian militant rocket fire from hospitals, then-State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf said “generally speaking…we have evidence throughout many years of Hamas using hospitals and schools, ambulances, other civilian places to hide rockets, to hide fighters.”
Not all department representatives seemed as cavalier about making such blanket statements when asked about Israeli attacks on hospitals in Gaza. Then-Spokesperson Jen Psaki remarked in late July that medical facilities in Gaza “must be treated as inviolable and off-limits from military use and targeting by all sides.”
