KABUL // The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres yesterday demanded an independent investigation into the US air strike on their hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz on Saturday that killed 12 staff and 10 patients, three of them children.
The US president Barack Obama has promised an inquiry but international outrage has piled pressure on the White House for more transparency as military chiefs backtracked on their account of the incident.
Nato at first said US forces carried out the attack to protect American special forces on the ground who came under Taliban fire.
But the head of US-led Nato forces in Afghanistan, Gen John Campbell, admitted yesterday that the air strike was launched after Afghan forces said they were under attack and called for support, and American soldiers had never been under threat.
The day after the attack MSF closed the hospital, a lifeline in a war-battered region with scant medical care.
“Under the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed, MSF demands that a full and transparent investigation into the event be conducted by an independent international body,” said the charity’s general director, Christopher Stokes.
“An internal investigation by a party to the conflict would be wholly insufficient.”
Mr Stokes rejected claims by Afghan officials that Taliban insurgents had been using the hospital as a position to target Afghan forces and civilians.
“These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present,” he said.
“This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimise the attack as ‘collateral damage’.”
The charity said Afghan and coalition troops were fully aware of the exact location of the hospital, having been given GPS coordinates of the facility that had been providing care for four years.
The charity said that despite frantic calls to military officials in Kabul and Washington, the main building housing the intensive care unit and emergency rooms was “repeatedly, very precisely” hit almost every 15 minutes for more than an hour.
The air strike came five days after Taliban fighters seized control of the strategic northern city, in their most spectacular victory since being toppled from power by a US-led coalition in 2001.
By yesterday Afghan forces had regained control of most of Kunduz, and some shops in the centre of the provincial capital opened for the first time since it fell to the Taliban.
Residents said that, unlike the previous eight days, they had not heard gun battles and were able to leave their homes to buy food and take stock of the damage done.
Soldiers were conducting house-to-house searches as they continued to push insurgents out of areas where there had been fierce fighting.
“The centre of the city is normal,” said resident Abdul Ghafoor, but it would still take time to recover.
“The city smells so bad with dead bodies still on the pavements and in the sewage. The local government must do something.”
* Agence France-Presse and Reuters
