Doctors Without Borders (MSF) President Joanne Liu asked if its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan had “lost its protected status” in the view of US policymakers, after the organization conducted an inquiry into the American airstrikes that leveled the facility, killing over two dozen people.
MSF concluded in a report published Thursday that the hospital had been treating wounded combatants from all sides, and that its neutrality had been respected prior to the Oct. 3 attack.
“What we know is that we were running a hospital treating patients, including wounded combatants from both sides –this was not a ‘Taliban base,’” Dr. Liu stated.
The Paris-based NGO said that “no armed combatants [were] within the hospital compound and there was no fighting from or in the direct vicinity of the [Kunduz Trauma Center] at the time of the airstrikes.”
“Kunduz was strictly implemented and controlled at all times and all MSF staff positively reported in their debriefing on the Taliban and Afghan army compliance with the no-weapon policy,” it stated.
As Liu alluded to, the report brought to light new assertions that challenge the current US position on the airstrikes: that they were conducted accidentally.
“We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility,” commander of US troops in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 6, after the Pentagon’s allegations about the presence of Taliban fighters and collateral damage had changed several times.
MSF, however, stated that US officials on Oct. 1 had asked about the prevalence of insurgents in their Kunduz hospital.
“MSF received a question from a US Government official in Washington DC, asking whether the hospital or any other of MSF’s locations had a large number of Taliban ‘holed up’ and enquired about the safety of our staff,” the report noted.
“MSF replied that our staff were working at full capacity in Kunduz and that the hospital was full of patients including wounded Taliban combatants, some of whom had been referred to the MSF medical post in Chardara.”
The report then said that Doctors Without Borders officials “expressed that we were very clear with both sides to the conflict about the need to respect medical structures as a condition to our ability to continue working.”
MSF went on to note that, the day before, its staff became “aware of two wounded Taliban patients that appeared to have had higher rank.” With weapons and uniforms banned at the facility, MSF came to this conclusion based on observations about who accompanied these men “and regular inquiries about their medical condition in order to accelerate treatment for rapid discharge.”
As previously reported, the attack itself was described as lasting about one hour, and some shots fired by the AC-130 gunship were described as “precise.” MSF said “the main hospital building was the principal target of the attack.”
The report did reveal that MSF staff allege being fired at while fleeing, and details of the aftermath make for grim reading, painting “a chaotic scene…people [were] in shock, vomiting and screaming.”
“One MSF staff member described a patient in a wheelchair attempting to escape from the inpatient department when he was killed by shrapnel from a blast,” the report said. “An MSF doctor suffered a traumatic amputation to the leg in one of the blasts. He was later operated on by the MSF team on a make-shift operating table on an office desk where he died. Other MSF staff describe seeing people running while on fire and then falling unconscious on the ground. One MSF staff was decapitated by shrapnel in the airstrikes.”
Ten patients, 13 staff “and seven more bodies that were burnt beyond recognition and are still under the process of being identified (these bodies have been duly buried),” the report said. One member of the medical staff and two patients are “still missing and presumed dead,” but may be identified by forensics tests on unidentified remains.
MSF also noted that as the wounded were being evacuated, “Afghan Special Forces started to search for Taliban patients” in MSF and Afghan government ambulances.
Kunduz had been the scene of heavy fighting between Taliban and government forces around the time of the attack. The fundamentalist insurgents had taken most of the city and controlled the area around the hospital before it was leveled by the US Army.
“At approximately 6am, an ambulance was caught in the crossfire while exiting the main gate of the Trauma Centre,” MSF noted, describing part of the evacuation. “Bullet impacts are visible on the car.”
The information about US officials asking about Taliban being “holed up” in the Kunduz hospital appears to bolster an Associated Press report that concluded the facility was being watched by US special operations analysts, fully aware they were monitoring a “protected medical site.” The wire service found that US operatives believed the MSF hospital was being used by a Pakistani agent with Taliban ties.
Read the MSF report here.
