Saturday, October 03, 2015

Those Red Crosses make great aiming points.


The US Air Force showed how well they had mastered lessons passed on from the Israeli Air Force and spent 30 minutes bombing the shit out of an Afghan hospital in Kunduz.
A U.S. airstrike in the Afghan city of Kunduz hit a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on Saturday, killing at least 16 people at the medical center, the medical charity said.

In a statement, MSF said the "sustained bombing" took place at 2:10 a.m. local time and continued for 30 minutes after staff raised the alarm to U.S. and Afghan military officials. Three children are believed to be among the dead.

Col. Brian Tribus, spokesman for the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, acknowledged that a raid “may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility." He added: "This incident is under investigation." The head of U.S.-led forces in the country later phoned Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to apologize, according to a statement from Ghani's office.

The United Nations slammed the incident as "inexcusable" and "possibly criminal."

Afghan forces backed by U.S. airstrikes have been fighting to dislodge Taliban insurgents who overran Kunduz earlier this week. Tribus said Saturday’s deadly raid was the 12th U.S. airstrike "in the Kunduz vicinity" since Tuesday.

Doctors Without Borders said its trauma center "was hit several times” during the attack and that the hospital was “very badly damaged."

One of the hospital’s walls collapsed as a result of the raid, scattering fragments of glass and wooden door frames, and three rooms were ablaze, said Saad Mukhtar, director of public health in Kunduz.

"Thick black smoke could be seen rising from some of the rooms," Mukhtar said after a visit to the hospital. "The fighting is still going on, so we had to leave."

MSF said all of its international staffers were alive and accounted for.

But many patients and staff remain missing after the attack which happened when almost 200 patients and employees were in the hospital, the only one in the region that can deal with major injuries.

"We are deeply shocked by the attack, the killing of our staff and patients and the heavy toll it has inflicted on healthcare in Kunduz," the aid group's operations director, Bart Janssens, said in a statement.

MSF said it gave the location of the hospital to both Afghan and U.S. sides several times in the past few months, as well as this week, to avoid being caught in crossfire.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said there were no militant fighters being treated at the hospital.
Who cares if there were any Taliban being treated there. It was a nice easy target to hit and probably made great camera footage for the boys back at base.

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