‘No armed fighters’ in Afghan hospital bombed by US forces

Wounded Taliban fighters were being treated in an Afghan hospital bombed by US forces but there were no armed men or fighting in the area, Doctors Without Borders said.

The internal report into the incident by the international medical charity, known by its French acronym MSF, confirmed that US forces had the exact co-ordinates of the clinic before launching an aerial assault on October 3 that killed 30 people, including doctors and patients.

The bombing lasted for more than an hour, during which time “patients burned in their beds, medical staff were decapitated and lost limbs, and others were shot by the circling AC130 gunship while fleeing the burning building”, the report says.

President Barack Obama apologised for the attack. The US military said the air strike, requested by Afghan forces, was a mistake.

But MSF general director Christopher Stokes said “a mistake is quite hard to believe and understand”.

The report, based on interviews with about 60 MSF staff, confirmed earlier accounts by the group.

MSF treats anyone wounded in armed conflict without regard to political affiliation, Mr Stokes said. He said a “no weapons” policy was upheld at the hospital in the northern city of Kunduz.

Acting Afghan defence minister Masoom Stanekzai, in a recent interview said the hospital was being used as a command centre for Taliban militants who seized the city on September 28. The militants held Kunduz for three days before being driven back by a government counter-offensive.

At least two US and Nato military investigations into the hospital bombing are under way, though it is unclear when the results will be made public.

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Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has so far ordered at least two reports, but one is only focused on what led to the Taliban takeover of Kunduz, according to Western and Afghan officials familiar with its content.

The MSF report says the group received a call on October 1 from a US official in Washington asking if there were a “large number of Taliban ’holed up’ in the Kunduz clinic or any other MSF locations”. Mr Stokes said the official was from the US Defence Department.

The official was told the hospital was “full of patients including wounded Taliban combatants”, the report says. Mr Stokes said there was no subsequent contact with US officials ahead of the bombing, but the call was not unusual given the fighting in Kunduz at the time.

Mr Stokes said the official’s question “seems to suggest they believed there were a group of Taliban holed up that weren’t only patients in the hospital”.

MSF has called for an independent investigation into the bombing. Many of the people killed were women and children, as well as doctors and nurses, Mr Stokes said.