Death Toll in Airstrike on Doctors Without Borders Hospital May Rise, Group Says

Rod Nordland, New York Times

8 October, 2015

Image: A Doctors Without Borders staff member, left, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday. He was wounded during the American airstrike on the group’s hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.CreditWakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

KABUL, Afghanistan — The death toll may increase significantly from an airstrike that devastated the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, officials from the organization said on Thursday, as the search continued for 24 staff members, many of them feared to be dead.

The deaths of 12 hospital staff members and 10 patients have been confirmed in the American airstrike, with an additional 37 people wounded. Five days after the Oct. 3 attack,Doctors Without Borders has still been unable to find the 24 staff members, despite having a hotline number for them to call.

“We are worried,” Guilhem Molinie, the group’s country representative in Afghanistan, said. “We haven’t stopped looking for them, and we’re not the only ones. Their families want to know where they are, too. We fear that some of them may be dead.”

New details of the attack emerged on Thursday at a news conference the organization held in Kabul, the capital, as its officials repeated their call for an independent, international investigation.

The American warplane that attacked the hospital, believed to be an AC-130 gunship supporting American Special Operations or Special Forces troops, made five separate bombing runs, spaced about 15 minutes apart, beginning at 2:08 a.m. on Saturday, Doctors Without Borders officials said, and the attack continued for an hour and fifteen minutes.

Earlier reports from the group had said the bombing went on for 30 minutes, but the officials said the half-hour referred to the time the bombing continued after Doctors Without Borders had reached Americans in Kabul and Washington to tell them the hospital was under aerial attack.

Each of the five air attacks, described as strafing runs — with the aircraft firing rapidly with munitions that caused explosions inside the building — specifically targeted the main hospital building, which housed the emergency room, intensive care unit, blood lab and X-ray area, the group said.

“It was hit with precision repeatedly while surrounding buildings were left untouched,” Mr. Molinie said.

Most of the victims were in the emergency room, intensive care unit and blood lab. Patients in nearby wards, some of them no more than ten yards from the main building, were untouched, according the Doctors Without Borders.

There was no active ground combat in the vicinity of the hospital at the time of the attack, as far as officials inside the hospital could tell, Mr. Molinie said. He described the Friday afternoon and evening before the attack as unusually quiet compared with previous days of fighting since the Taliban captured Kunduz on Sept. 28.

Ambulances were able to bring civilian victims to the hospital that day, including a family of five, hit in their car as they tried to flee the city. Three young children from that family were killed in the airstrike, Doctors Without Borders officials said.

Both Taliban and government fighters were being treated in the hospital — a fully equipped trauma center specializing in war wounds, with 150 beds and a staff of over 400 that included expatriates and Afghans — but Doctors Without Borders officials insisted that there had been no weapons or explosives anywhere inside the hospital compound, in line with its longstanding policy.

The group has on several occasions immediately shut down its hospitals in Afghanistan when armed men have insisted on entering.

“Military and armed opposition patients lay side by side in the hospital and were given the best care possible, according to their medical needs, with impartiality and neutrality,” Mr. Molinie said. “Once patients are injured, they lose their combatant status, according to international law.”

An operation was underway at the time of the airstrike, with a general surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon and an anesthesiologist, all foreigners, in the operating theater — a separate wing of the building that was struck. The airstrikes, however, were concentrated on the main wing of the building. No foreign staff members were wounded or killed.

“This amounts to a grave violation of international humanitarian law, not just an attack on our hospital, but an attack on the Geneva Conventions as well,” Christopher Stokes, the organization’s general director, said in Kabul.

He said that when President Obama called the international president of Doctors Without Borders, Dr. Joanne Liu, on Wednesday to apologize for the airstrike, she asked him to support an independent investigation by International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission.

The international body, founded in 1991 but never before activated, would need permission from the United States and Afghanistan to conduct an investigation.

Mr. Obama replied to Dr. Liu that he had confidence in the three military investigations already underway, Mr. Stokes said. They include one by the United States Army, a NATO inquiry and a joint Afghan-American military investigation.

“We believe it wouldn’t be realistic to ask one of the parties of the conflict to investigate themselves,” Mr. Stokes said.

Doctors Without Borders has issued a statement acknowledging that Dr. Liu had “received” Mr. Obama’s apology, but it pointedly did not say she had accepted it.

Copyright: New York Times 2015

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