US says Afghans requested air strike on MSF hospital in Kunduz

The general ultimately responsible for Saturday’s US air strike on a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital said yesterday Afghan forces attempting to retake the city of Kunduz from the Taliban called in the raid.

John Campbell, speaking at the Pentagon, said he was correcting an initial US statement that said the air strike was meant to defend US forces under fire. Gen Campbell, the commander of the 9,800 US forces and residual Nato forces in Afghanistan, did not apologise for an air strike that MSF is calling a war crime , saying he would have a preliminary report from US military investigators "in the next couple of days".

But Gen Campbell, who offered few new details of the "tragic" strike, suggested the Taliban was ultimately responsible for a series of air strikes that has occasioned shock and outrage, particularly after the US late last week condemned bombings by Russia in Syria and its Saudi ally in Yemen.

“Unfortunately, the Taliban decided to remain in the city and fight from within, knowingly putting civilians at significant risk of harm,” Gen Campbell told reporters, saying the Taliban “have purposely chosen a fight from within a heavily urbanised area”.

Erroneous impression Correcting what he called an erroneous earlier impression from his command, Gen Campbell said that US special operations forces on the ground in Kunduz to “advise” Afghan forces were not under attack to prompt the raid. Instead, Gen Campbell said, the aerial assault, conducted by a US AC-130 gunship, was requested by the Afghans.

“We have now learned that on 3 October, Afghan forces advised that they were taking fire from enemy positions and asked for air support from US forces. An air strike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat and several civilians were accidentally struck,” Gen Campbell said.

MSF has aggressively challenged the US military and Afghan government’s account of the strike, which killed at least 12 of their staff and 10 patients – among them three children. It said it had provided precise coordinates of the hospital to all parties to the conflict, immediately raising questions about the US’s targeting choices.

The group said the main hospital building was “repeatedly hit very precisely during each aerial raid, while surrounding buildings were left mostly untouched,” implying that the US strikes were aimed at a civilian medical facility.

Three inquiries Gen Campbell did not explain what happened to the GPS co-ordinates, and said that the answer would have to await the results of what has now become three separate inquiries, conducted by the US, Afghanistan and Nato. Nor did he say what happened after MSF attempted to alert US and Afghan authorities to the bombing of its hospital.

On Sunday, an Afghan interior ministry spokesman, Sediq Sediqi, said that "10 or 15 terrorists were hiding in the hospital". MSF called the account both false and an "admission of a war crime", as it suggested that the hospital was a deliberate target of what it described as several rounds of air strikes over the course of an hour, spaced approximately 15 minutes apart.

"This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimise the attack as 'collateral damage'. There can be no justification for this abhorrent attack on our hospital that resulted in the deaths of MSF staff as they worked, and patients as they lay in their beds," Christopher Stokes, the general director of MSF, said. -(Guardian service)