A Medecins Sans Frontières–operated hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was hit several times by air strikes on Oct. 3, 2015, leaving at least 22 people dead. Among the 22 dead are staff and several children—a total of 37 others were also injured. U.S. forces were carrying out air strikes at the time, targeting Taliban forces in the area. MSF has reported that many of the staff and patients remain unaccounted for.
The bombing is particularly tragic considering that both U.S. and Taliban forces had been repeatedly informed of the precise GPS co-ordinates of the hospital on many occasions. An MSF representative said that the attacks went on for more than an hour, despite repeated desperate calls to cease the strikes sent to U.S. and Afghan military officials both in Kabul and Washington.
The Afghan defense ministry has since claimed that armed members of the Taliban were using the hospital to target Afghan civilians. MSF has soundly denied this, explaining “not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the hospital compound prior to the U.S. air strike on Saturday morning.”
In contrast, the U.S. military has changed its account of how and why the air strike was carried out. Initially, the U.S. military reported that U.S. forces had come under fire. Later, the U.S. military claimed that Afghan forces had requested supportive air strikes. Recently, however, the U.S. military chief in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, admitted that “the decision to provide aerial-fires was a U.S. decision made within the U.S. chain of command.”
He continued by promising the Senate that ordering a “thorough, objective and transparent” investigation will be his next move.
In an unprecedented move, MSF president Joanne Liu called on the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC)—a rarely utilized organization founded in 1991 under the Geneva Conventions—to investigate the attack. The IHFFC remains “the only permanent body set up specifically to investigate violations of international humanitarian law.”
According to IHFFC regulations, however, any inquiry needs the specific endorsement of all parties involved in the conflict. As neither the US nor Afghanistan is a signatory, they would both need to issue individual admissions of consent before an investigation could take place.
MSF claimed that the language used by both the U.S. and Afghan forces imply that the two military groups worked together to deliberately target the hospital.
According to the International Criminal Court, war crimes include the intentional direct targeting of hospitals. A war crime is an act that constitutes a breach of the laws of war. The idea is that an individual can be held responsible for the actions of a country or that nation’s soldiers.
Liu followed up these accusations by saying that MFS “cannot rely on internal military investigations by the U.S., Nato, and Afghan forces.”
International war laws strictly prohibit any attack on patients and medical personnel as well as medical facilities. Even if the Taliban, or any combatant, take refuge in a hospital, the hospital should not be attacked. The attacking of a hospital would result in too many civilian deaths, and under the rules of the ICC, would break the rule of proportionality.
According to Human Rights Watch “The laws of war require that even if military forces misuse a hospital to deploy able-bodied combatants or weapons, the attacking force must issue a warning to cease this misuse, setting a reasonable time limit for it to end, and attacking only after such a warning has gone unheeded.” The U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein has called the incident “tragic, inexcusable, and possibly even criminal.”
Initial findings of an early investigation into the bombing have confirmed that the U.S forces were fully aware that the site was a hospital. Furthermore, the hospital was listed in a military database of restricted sites—such as mosques, schools, and hospitals—that American pilots are explicitly forbidden from bombing, even if there are insurgents present.
The General Director of MSF, Christopher Stokes, has since said “Until we understand what happened and we can gain guarantees that this unacceptable attack cannot happen again, we cannot reopen and put our staff in danger.”