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From: Miriam Vieni [mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
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Subject: FW: Doctors With Enemies: Did Afghan Forces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?
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From: Miriam Vieni [mailto:miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2016 3:41 PM
To: 'blind-democrdacy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'
Subject: Doctors With Enemies: Did Afghan Forces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?
Doctors With Enemies: Did Afghan Forces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?
The U.S. government’s report has ruled the attack an accident. But mounting
evidence suggests that Afghans’ mistrust for the nonprofit medical group might
have set the tragedy in motion.
By MATTHIEU AIKINS
May 17, 2016
Dr. Esmatullah Esmat, who survived the bombing.
VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
FEATURE
Doctors With Enemies: Did Afghan Forces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?
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Dr. Esmatullah Esmat, who survived the bombing.
VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
By MATTHIEU AIKINS
May 17, 2016
For the last hour, the American gunship had been circling high above the city,
carefully observing its target with night-¬vision sensors and waiting for
clearance to strike. It was 2 in the morning on Oct. 3, 2015, and Kunduz City
was enveloped in total darkness. The city’s power had gone out five days before
— soon after the Taliban took over the provincial capital, in a humiliating
blow to the American and Afghan governments — and it stayed off through the
bitter fighting that followed, as commandos from both nations counterattacked.
The aircraft’s target, a distinctively T-¬shaped building set on an expansive
lawn, was lit by generators, a beacon in the blacked-¬out city. As they
prepared to fire, the gunship’s crew members radioed to the ground force
commander, a United States Army Special Forces major, for more information.
“Looking for confirmation on which building to strike — Confirm it is the
large, T-¬shaped building ... in the center of the compound.
Affirm.”
An AC-130 circles its target like a ball swung from a string, raining down
gunfire along the radius. At 2:08 a.m., the gunship began its assault, starting
on the eastern end of the T-¬shaped building and working methodically west. For
half an hour, the AC-130 fired its 105-¬millimeter howitzer, the largest
airborne gun in existence, and its 40-¬millimeter Bofors cannon, which shoots
exploding incendiary rounds and is ideal for hunting people who flee targeted
buildings by foot, often referred to by pilots as “squirters.” There were about
50 squirters at the site, the crew noted, a surprisingly high number. Through
the infrared scope, the building glowed as it burned, while ghostly shapes that
flitted from inside were gunned down.
“We started a fire, good effects.”
At roughly the same time, 150 miles south in Kabul, Guilhem Molinie, the head
of the Afghan mission for Doctors Without Borders, known by its French
initials, M.S.F., was woken by a phone call: His hospital in Kunduz was
burning. A few minutes later, he received a chilling update: It was being
bombed from the air. That could mean only an American or Afghan attack. He
began frantically calling the United States military, the United Nations,
anyone who might be able to make it stop. At 2:19 a.m., he spoke to an officer
at the Army Special Forces headquarters at Bagram Air Base, who said he would
investigate. The airstrike would continue for an additional 18 minutes. The
officer later texted Molinie: “I’ll do my best, praying for you all.”
By the time the sun rose, the hospital’s main building was a smoldering ruin.
It had been leveled with devastating precision; the other buildings on the
compound, some no more than a few dozen feet away, were left unharmed.
According to M.S.F., at least 42 people were killed in the attack and dozens
injured. It was among the most shocking massacres in the American-¬led war in
Afghanistan, and certainly the most baffling. Why would an American warplane
destroy a working hospital full of doctors and patients?
On April 29, seven months after the bombing, the United States military
released a heavily redacted version of its investigation into the airstrike.
The report asserts that it was an accident, a result of equipment failures and
bad decisions on the part of the gunship crew and the Special Forces. “The
investigation concluded that the personnel involved did not know they were
striking a medical facility,” Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of the military’s
Central Command, said at a news conference. “They were absolutely trying to do
the right thing.”
Even taken at face value, the report reveals more than a simple error. The
circumstances that led to the destruction of the hospital are a direct result
of how the Special Forces were made to bear the weight of the United States’
contradictory strategy in Afghanistan, which seeks to both end its involvement
in the war and prop up the struggling Afghan government. Restricted to a
supposedly noncombat role as advisers, the Special Forces in Kunduz ended up
calling in the airstrike, which was in support of Afghan troops against a
target a quarter-mile away, as self-defense, which meant that it bypassed many
safeguards intended to prevent civilian casualties.
Moreover, there is evidence — both buried in the report and from interviews
conducted on the front lines in Kunduz — that suggests that Afghan troops may
have deliberately provided the hospital as a target. Though the Special Forces
later said they were unaware that it was the hospital, the redacted
investigation documents show that they passed a description that matched the
M.S.F. compound to the AC-130 as a target — a fact that the military elides in
its summary of the bombing. This description originated from their Afghan
partners. In my conversations with them in November in the aftermath of the
bombing, some of the Afghan forces in Kunduz, citing false intelligence that
the hospital had been taken over by insurgents, said that it had been
justifiably targeted.
Both the American military and the Afghan government declined to comment on
whether Afghan forces had intended to target the hospital. But a question hangs
over the Kunduz bombing, even as the military has moved to declare the matter
settled: Did Afghan forces, out of longstanding mistrust of M.S.F., draw the
United States into a terrible tragedy?
When Maj. Michael Hutchinson, known to his friends as Hutch, redeployed last
year to Afghanistan, he was sure — as he later told military investigators —
that getting outside the wire to engage in combat was mostly a thing of the
past. The Americans were there to train, advise and assist the Afghans. It was
their war now. The American combat mission in Afghanistan had ended in 2014, as
announced by President Obama in a Rose Garden speech that year. The remaining
American forces were supposed to be restricted to two narrow roles: A noncombat
NATO training mission, called Resolute Support, was there to advise Afghan
forces, while the American counterterrorism force under Freedom’s Sentinel was
charged with targeting Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. “The U.S. military will
not be engaged in specific operations targeting members of the Taliban just
because they’re members of the Taliban,” Josh Earnest, the White House
spokesman, told reporters in 2014.
But as the Afghan government has begun to lose ground against the Taliban,
United States forces have found themselves pulled back into combat. Since the
new missions began in 2015, at least 87 American military personnel have been
killed or wounded in action. Much of that fighting has fallen to Special
Operations units like Hutchinson’s company, which was assigned responsibility
for northern Afghanistan under a task force led by the First Battalion, Third
Special Forces Group. (Hutchinson’s name is redacted in the military’s report,
but he is referred to throughout as “the G.F.C.,” for ground force commander.
His identity was confirmed by Joe Kasper, Representative Duncan Hunter’s chief
of staff, who has been in contact with Special Forces who were in Kunduz. The
military declined to comment on Hutchinson’s role or make him available for an
interview.)
From the start, Hutchinson had been wary of Kunduz and its messy politics.
“Ironically, I probably jinxed myself on this,” he later told military
investigators. “I said I did not believe that we should get involved in Kunduz
any further than [training and advising] unless the provincial capital falls,
because structurally it is such a political and ethnic problem. It’s not
something that we can effectively weigh in on.”
Kunduz, a fertile wedge of rice and wheat fields tucked between the foothills
of the Hindu Kush mountains and the Amu Darya river basin, is one of the
provinces where the Taliban have made their biggest inroads in recent years.
Yet in the months leading up to the fall of the city, neither the Americans nor
the Afghans seemed particularly worried about its stability. On Aug. 13, Brig.
Gen. Wilson Shoffner, the United States military’s spokesman in Afghanistan,
was asked about the situation there during a news conference. “I think there’s
been a lot of generalization when it comes to reports on the north,” he said.
“Kunduz is — is not now and has not been in danger of being overrun by the
Taliban.”
Roughly six weeks later, around 3 in the morning on Sept. 28, Taliban fighters
attacked the city’s outskirts on three fronts. “The mujahedeen were united
under one command,” said a Taliban commander who took part in the offensive and
goes by the name Shahid. He spoke by phone from outside the city in the weeks
after the attack. “We broke our enemy.” Though Kunduz City was home to
thousands of Afghan army, police and intelligence personnel, its defenses
quickly collapsed, the officers fleeing in disarray to the airport on a plateau
overlooking the city. Within hours of their initial assault, the Taliban were
freely roaming the streets, looting the abandoned bases of weapons, secret
documents, Ford pickup trucks, Humvees and even two old Soviet-¬made T-62
tanks. Thousands of residents jammed the highways as they fled to neighboring
cities; meanwhile, hordes of Taliban fighters, some from surrounding provinces,
streamed into the city, attracted by the prospect of a major victory. It was
the first time since 2001 that the Taliban had captured a provincial capital.
As panic spread across northern Afghanistan, the Special Forces were tapped to
help save Afghanistan’s fifth-¬largest city. There was already one group called
an Operational Detachment Alpha — an “A team” of 12 Green Berets, plus some
support troops, including joint terminal attack controllers, who direct
airstrikes — based at the Kunduz airport. An additional Operational Detachment
Alpha, plus four operators from a third one, were sent up from Bagram, the main
American military base north of Kabul. They arrived around 6 in the morning on
Sept. 29, a little more than 12 hours after the city fell. Hutchinson was put
in command of the entire force.
Afghan reinforcements were also flown in, including a contingent of police
special forces and about 200 soldiers from the Afghan Army’s most elite unit,
the Special Operations Force, which was also known by its Pashto initials,
K.K.A., and was formerly attached to the United States military’s secretive
Joint Special Operations Command.
These coalition troops confronted a scene of total chaos: thousands of security
forces and civilian officials clamoring for space on the few evacuation flights
available, some casting aside their uniforms and weapons on the road. When the
Taliban attacked the airport plateau that evening, the defenders began fleeing
the perimeter, but the Special Forces called in airstrikes, which hammered the
insurgent forces, breaking their offensive and leaving dozens of dead fighters
scattered through the arid hills. “If the Americans hadn’t intervened,” said
Col. Abdullah Gard, then the head of the Kunduz police’s quick-¬reaction force,
“the airport would have fallen.”
Earlier that same day, a Toyota Corolla pulled up to the main entrance of the
Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. “There was a big fat guy driving,”
said an M.S.F. employee who was on duty at the time. “Someone told me he’s the
big boss of the Taliban.” It was Janat Gul, one of the most powerful Taliban
leaders in northern Afghanistan. With him was Abdul Salam, the “shadow
governor” responsible for Kunduz. Salam and Gul got out and went inside, the
employee recalled — unarmed as per the hospital’s strict no-¬weapons policy —
to meet with expatriate staff members. (Doctors Without Borders confirmed
Salam’s visit that day but said he didn’t enter the hospital.)
According to Molinie, who was monitoring events from Kabul, the Taliban
leadership pledged full cooperation and protection and asked that the hospital
stay operational during whatever fighting was to come. “The message was that we
could continue our activities, that we would be safe and protected and that the
patients of the hospital would be safe and protected,” said Molinie, “as well
as the patients from government forces.” The hospital staff activated the
mass-¬casualty plan and readied for the flood of patients that would soon
arrive.
For M.S.F., dealing with the Taliban was a routine part of the neutral role it
seeks to maintain in Afghanistan. One of the world’s largest medical charities,
M.S.F. sees itself as an impartial humanitarian organization in the mold of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, one that could cross front lines to
provide treatment to anyone who needed it, including wounded combatants.
That role has been getting harder to play. M.S.F. has been active in
Afghanistan since 1980 and had worked with both the mujahedeen and Taliban
governments. But after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, its ethos of political
neutrality contrasted sharply with that of the Global War on Terror, where you
were either with the United States and its allies or with the terrorists.
Afghan forces have been especially resentful of the fact that as patients,
insurgents in M.S.F. facilities are entitled to the protection of international
law.
In 2004, five M.S.F. staff members were shot in an unsolved murder. A Taliban
spokesman claimed responsibility, accusing the organization of serving American
interests. But according to M.S.F., Afghan officials presented them with
credible evidence that local forces were actually responsible. No action was
taken against them by the government, and the organization pulled out of the
country.
When M.S.F. returned to Afghanistan in 2009, it followed the example of the Red
Cross and negotiated its access in the field with the Taliban leadership. Eager
for the help of humanitarian groups in responding to the worsening conflict,
the United States and Afghan governments acquiesced. “The initial deal with the
Afghan government, with NATO and the U.S.,” Molinie said, “was that we would
reopen a mission on the condition that all parties would accept that we talk to
everybody.”
But balancing the demands of belligerents in a ruthless war was fraught with
risk. In its zeal to help Afghans trapped behind the Taliban’s lines, M.S.F.
risked souring its relationship with the Afghan government. One of its more
ambitious plans called for opening a hospital in the Taliban-¬held northern
part of Helmand Province, along with an airstrip to fly in international staff
members and medical supplies behind insurgent lines. “Personally, I thought the
idea was completely insane,” said a Western official who was briefed on the
proposal last year. “The Afghan government would have reacted strongly against
M.S.F.”
In 2011, M.S.F. opened the hospital in Kunduz, a location it chose because it
believed, presciently, that the province’s bloody past presaged a violent
future. But some members of the Afghan government and security forces there had
little respect for M.S.F.’s neutrality and resented its treatment of wounded
Taliban. When I visited Kunduz in November, their anger was still surprisingly
raw, despite the recent destruction of the hospital. “They give them medicine;
they transport and treat their injured,” Gard, the commander of the
quick-¬reaction force, told me. “Their existence is a big problem for us.” And
though the hospital treated many more wounded for the government, there were
rumors that M.S.F. had carried out unnecessary amputations on them, according
to Fawzia Yaftali, a member of the provincial council. “The general perception
was that M.S.F. supported the Taliban,” she said.
On July 1, an episode occurred that should have been, in retrospect, a warning
sign for all involved. A team of Afghan police commandos from elite units
mentored by United States and NATO special forces — the 222 and 333 Battalions,
which were later part of the Afghan forces sent to Kunduz with the Green Berets
— had arrived in Kunduz Province to track a high-¬value target, a militant
commander named Abu Huzaifa. After targeting Huzaifa in an airstrike, the
commandos believed that he had been wounded and taken to the M.S.F. hospital in
Kunduz City. They drove there and forced their way inside, where they
physically assaulted the staff members and fired their weapons into the air,
according to M.S.F. Huzaifa was nowhere to be found.
“It was a kind of wild intrusion,” Molinie said. After M.S.F. phoned the
governor and the police chief, the commandos were called off. Furious that the
sanctity of the hospital had been violated, M.S.F. closed it to new admissions
for five days, until officials received guarantees from Kabul that it would be
respected. Huzaifa would be killed seven weeks later — by an American drone,
according to a senior Afghan special forces commander — but bitterness about
the hospital raid lingered among the Kunduz security forces. “They hid him,”
Gard told me, without offering any evidence. His men had accompanied the police
commandos to the hospital. “The people who work there are traitors, all of
them.”
On Wednesday, Sept. 30, the day after the Taliban’s assault on the airport was
beaten back, Hutchinson started planning an operation to retake the city. The
political pressure to do so was made apparent when, before his departure,
Hutchinson, along with an Afghan general, spoke by videoconference with Gen.
John Campbell, then the commander of American forces in Afghanistan. Campbell,
who was in Kabul, was not happy with the Afghans. “General Campbell was
understandably upset,” Hutchinson told investigators. “Not only was it a shock
and travesty that they had” — what follows is redacted in the military’s report
but seems to refer to how Afghan forces abandoned Kunduz City without a fight.
The fall of Kunduz had called into question the viability of Obama’s strategy
in Afghanistan, and storm clouds were gathering in Washington, where Campbell
had previously been scheduled to testify before Congress. “He was very much in
a hurry to get back to D.C.,” Hutchinson says in the report. “He had a lot on
his plate.” (Campbell, who is now retired, declined to comment for this
article.)
After the video conference, Hutchinson briefed his men on what the four-star
general told him. This was a strategically vital mission, and the whole world
was watching. “It had to happen as soon as possible. Failure was not an option
on this operation.”
The operation fit awkwardly under Resolute Support, the noncombat training
mission, and Freedom’s Sentinel, which was supposed to engage only ISIS and Al
Qaeda, not the Taliban. Indeed, while Hutchinson had submitted his operation
plan to his headquarters at Bagram under Resolute Support, it came back
approved under Freedom’s Sentinel. Later, Hutchinson told investigators that he
thought he was operating under Resolute Support’s rules of engagement.
The distinction between the two — which were both led by Campbell — would
become almost meaningless in Kunduz. The same unit could be carrying out a
training mission one minute and a counterterrorism one the next. According to
the military, in the first four days of fighting in Kunduz, 13 airstrikes were
conducted under Resolute Support and nine under Freedom’s Sentinel. Before
conducting strikes, aircrews would sometimes radio to ask under which mission
they were about to shoot.
The plan Hutchinson submitted, called Kunduz Clearing Patrol, was a risky
mission to strike deep into the city, where his men and the Afghan commandos
would take over the police and governor’s compound and set up a forward
stronghold. Hutchinson later admitted that he had underestimated the number of
Taliban in the city as “a small group of dedicated individuals.” The Green
Berets planned to stay for only 24 hours, long enough for the local Afghan
forces at the airport to rally and return to the city. “I really thought that
the Afghans would see that it wasn’t that big of a deal and they would all come
back in,” he said in the report. “We all agreed it had to happen fast, and the
only people who were willing to go in, unfortunately, were people who did not
know the city of Kunduz.”
That same Wednesday night, around 10:30, according to the report, the Green
Berets, accompanied by the Afghan police and army commandos, as well as Gard’s
quick-¬reaction force, rolled out of the airfield in a convoy of armored
vehicles and fought their way into the city. First they cleared Gard’s
compound, which the insurgents had captured the day before. They were hit by
repeated Taliban ambushes and called in airstrikes from a circling AC-130
gunship, killing dozens of insurgents. While entering the police compound, they
set off a tripwire bomb, but no one was hurt. The Afghan and American commandos
posted guards on the walls and set up a base inside. A Humvee with a single
small-¬scale map of Kunduz spread over its hood served as the Special Forces’
command post.
The city around them was still swarming with insurgents. When the sun rose, the
attacks began. Hoping to overrun the police compound’s defenders, the Taliban
launched relentless assaults from the surrounding buildings, sometimes getting
close enough for the Green Berets to use grenades. As the insurgents rained
rockets and machine-¬gun fire on the compound’s barriers, the Special Forces
called in six “danger close” gun runs from F-16s, the strikes near enough to
risk friendly fire. Still, the insurgents kept coming. “I was in a lot of
effective firefights,” one of the Green Berets later wrote, “but this was on a
completely different level than even any of the experienced special operators
on any of the detachments had seen — particularly over such a sustained period
of time. How no one was killed, or even wounded, is an absolute miracle.”
<img class="span-asset-img "
src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/05/22/magazine/22kunduz2/22kunduz2-articleLarge.jpg";
/>
The Kunduz hospital after the attack.
VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
An Afghan force of 500 was supposed to show up the next day from the airport to
relieve them; it never did. When a few Afghan police and army personnel did
arrive, they said they would abandon their positions if the Americans left. It
soon became apparent to Hutchinson and his men that their 24-hour mission was
going to last longer.
By sending the Special Forces to hold an isolated position deep inside a city
held by the Taliban, the American military allowed the Afghan government to
claim a badly needed propaganda victory. On Oct. 1, as the Green Berets and the
Afghan commandos fought for their lives at the police compound, President
Ashraf Ghani held a news conference in Kabul to declare that all of Kunduz City
had been retaken. “Thank God we had no fatalities,” he said. (In fact, the
battle to recapture the city would rage for two more weeks, and at least 38
Afghan police officers and soldiers would be killed.)
The fact that the Special Forces were surrounded by Taliban also meant that the
liberal use of American air power in Kunduz could be justified as
self-¬defense. The military went further by applying what it called Persons
With Designated Special Status to the Afghan commandos in Kunduz, a designation
that allows American forces to consider temporarily defending certain partnered
Afghan troops as part of their own self-¬defense — essentially, self-¬defense
of someone else.
Later, investigators would conclude that Hutchinson had improperly used these
self-¬defense rules in order to launch offensive “pre-¬assault fires.” It was
his response, perhaps, to the conundrum he faced by engaging in combat during a
supposedly noncombat mission: Was he supposed to wait for the commandos to get
pinned down or take casualties before striking the insurgents they had been
sent into the city to fight? “I can’t expect them to assault that,” he told
investigators, referring to the K.K.A.’s subsequent attack on the Taliban-¬held
intelligence headquarters. “They can’t sit out there and die on the road.”
Armed with this authorization and ordered to take back the city of Kunduz, the
Special Forces called in air support for the Afghan commandos, who, taking
advantage of their superior night-¬vision capabilities, would set out from the
police compound to raid Taliban positions around the city at night. “Where
there was heavy pressure on us,” said Yaftali, the K.K.A. commander, “wherever
there was heavy fighting, we told the Americans to strike there.”
In a city where all other institutions had been abandoned by their staff, the
M.S.F. hospital was a lifeline for the people of Kunduz. Dr. Esmatullah Esmat
had been a surgeon for eight years in Afghanistan, but he had never witnessed
anything like this. “When I saw my patients after surgery and they would say,
‘Dr. Esmat, you saved me,’ I felt energy,” he said. “We never felt tired.” A
stoop-¬shouldered, stocky man with a shy smile, Esmat and his fellow surgeons
worked in alternating 12-hour shifts. Over five days, the hospital would
receive 376 patients in its emergency room, more than a quarter of them women
and children. Esmat had to amputate the leg of a 3-year-old girl. “I have a
daughter the same age,” he said.
It was a bloody and chaotic scene. In the red room, the most critical cases
were prepped — head and torso wounds, or traumatic amputations, typically — and
then sent immediately into one of the hospital’s three operating theaters.
There, stripped naked under the surgeon’s lamp, Taliban fighters, civilians and
government soldiers alike became patients whose lives needed to be saved. Esmat
and his colleagues performed 138 operations during those days, almost a third
of them emergency laparotomies — the abdomen was cut open and internal organs
were piled on the chest, so that the surgical team could go through them,
painstaking inch by inch, looking for lacerations to suture.
As the wards overflowed, the staff laid down mattresses between the beds and in
the hallways and stretched the 90-bed hospital to fit 130. There were gruesome
and strange sights, like the Taliban fighter from a commando unit, in a
distinctive camouflage-¬pattern robe, weeping uncontrollably while stroking the
head of his body-¬bagged friend. “It was a bit hopeless,” said Faizullah
Alokozai, the hospital’s archivist. “I saw a lot of dead children.”
Though the M.S.F. hospital was crowded with fighters, whether patients or
caretakers (each patient was allowed one), staff members and civilians who were
present said the insurgents respected the rules. They left their weapons
outside or handed them over at the gun lockers at the entrance. One employee
recalled seeing a fighter give up his weapon but forget his ammunition vest;
when the employee nervously approached the fighter about it, the man apologized
profusely and handed it over. “We had respect for the hospital, as they were
serving the people,” said Shahid, the Taliban commander. “I myself went there
once when one of our men was wounded, and before entering we submitted our
weapons outside.”
M.S.F. did allow caretakers and patients to keep their cellphones, however, and
I was told by several staff members and civilians present that some Taliban
caretakers also brought in hand-held radios. (Molinie said that while there was
no specific rule against radios, he didn’t believe that they were allowed in.)
According to M.S.F., some of the Taliban patients were high-¬ranking leaders.
Taliban vehicles were also allowed inside the hospital grounds to drop off
critically injured patients.
Unknown to M.S.F., Afghan forces in Kunduz were coming to the false conclusion
that the hospital was being used as a Taliban stronghold and headquarters,
which would have meant the loss of its protected status. “All their most
important leaders were inside the hospital, especially Tajiks, Uzbeks and
high-¬ranking Pakistanis,” Gard said. He claimed his information came from
local informants who had been inside the hospital and witnessed the Taliban
operating there. “They had raised their flag and established their headquarters
there.”
These unconfirmed reports were lent additional weight by signals intelligence.
Yaftali, the K.K.A. commander, told me that his unit’s Wolfhound radio
direction finders, which allowed them to determine the range and bearing of
enemy radios, picked up Taliban transmissions from inside the hospital. “We
located about 10 to 15 radios from there,” he said. “The Taliban were inside
and outside the hospital.”
The Afghan forces I spoke to said they relayed these reports to the American
military, and it’s clear that, before the strike, some Americans were aware of
the concerns that the M.S.F. hospital had been taken over by the Taliban. On
Oct. 1, Carter Malkasian, a civilian adviser to the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, emailed M.S.F. in New York to ask about the
safety of its staff and whether Taliban fighters were “holed up” inside the
hospital.
Maj. Gen. Mark Quantock, Campbell’s intelli¬gence deputy, told investigators:
“Although we assessed that there were Taliban using the hospital, you cannot
shoot up a building under the current authorities. Period.”
Molinie, M.S.F.’s head of mission in Kabul, said he was then unaware of the
American military’s suspicions, which he criticized as baseless. On Sept. 29,
he provided Resolute Support with GPS coordinates for four of M.S.F.’s
facilities in Kunduz, including the hospital, as a precaution. And the day
before the bombing, he coordinated the delivery of three truckloads of medical
supplies to Kunduz with an officer at the Special Forces’ headquarters at
Bagram. “He informed me of the number of beds, number of international aid
workers in the hospital, and that the Taliban were ‘protecting’ the hospital
and were treating the government casualties well,” the officer later wrote.
It’s unclear from the report what, if anything, the Special Forces on the
ground in Kunduz knew about the M.S.F. hospital. Several staff members at their
headquarters at Bagram told investigators that they had passed M.S.F.’s grid
coordinates on two separate occasions to the Green Berets at the police
compound. “I know I read the four grids and got a read-back for accuracy,” one
person wrote. “I think I used the term ‘Doctors Without Borders,’ not ‘M.S.F.’
” Hutchinson and other members of his team, however, said they never received
the coordinates from Bagram and were unaware of the hospital’s location before
the strike, a contention the investigators accepted in their final report.
But whether they heard the Afghans’ false reports before or after the strike,
some of the Green Berets in Kunduz appeared to believe them. “There were enemy
in there,” one later wrote, according to an email excerpt provided by
Representative Hunter’s office. “They were using it as a [command and control]
node. They had already removed and ransomed the foreign doctors, and they had
fired on partnered personnel from there.”
<img class="span-asset-img "
src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/05/22/magazine/22kunduz3/22kunduz3-articleLarge-v2.jpg";
/>
Ismail Zahir (right), with his father and brothers. His sisters Morsal and
Madina died at the hospital.
VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
For the civilians who remained in Kunduz during the fighting — the United
Nations estimates that 13,000 families were displaced by the fighting and that
848 civilians were killed or injured — life was a daily struggle to survive.
There was no electricity, and the price of basics like bread and cooking oil
had shot up, for those who could find them at all. Heading out in search of
supplies meant risking your life in the crossfire on the streets. But for
people like Ismail Zahir, a floppy-¬haired, soft-¬spoken 20-year-old who worked
in construction, there was no other choice. With his father deaf and disabled,
his family relied on their eldest son as their breadwinner. When there were
lulls in the fighting, Ismail would head out into the street, dodging sniper
fire. “I was afraid,” he said, “but not as afraid as I was for my family.”
Once Afghan and American forces counterattacked and airstrikes began hitting
the city, he grew especially worried for his sisters Morsal and Madina. Morsal,
15, was quiet and fastidious like him, while Madina, at 5 the youngest in the
family, was impish and apple-¬cheeked. At night, they screamed in fear when
bombs struck nearby. They begged the family to leave Kunduz.
Finally, on Oct. 2, the fourth day after the fall of Kunduz, Ismail and a
friend set off across the city to find a car to hire, riding tandem on a
borrowed bicycle through the deserted streets. Taliban fighters stopped them at
a checkpoint but let them pass — civilians were free to flee if they wished. On
the outskirts of the city, they found a taxi driver. He wanted the equivalent
of $200 to take them to Kabul, five times as much as the normal rate, and they
had no choice but to accept.
Returning home with the driver, he and his friend packed their families into
the Toyota station wagon, 14 people in total, most of them women and children.
The driver set off south, toward Kabul. As they came around a corner, they
spotted an Afghan Army armored vehicle. Perhaps thinking they were insurgents,
it opened fire. As the driver wheeled around, bullets tore through the back of
the car. Four of the boys were shot in the arms and legs, but the two girls,
Morsal and Madina, were the most grievously wounded. Somehow, the car made it
to the M.S.F. hospital.
When Esmat arrived in the red room, he found Morsal laid out, pale and
beautiful. She was dead from a head wound. Madina’s abdomen was torn open, and
her intestines protruded, but she was still conscious and cried out, “Mother,
mother.” As Esmat looked around and saw Amin Bajawri, the emergency-¬room
doctor, and the rest of the staff members weeping, he felt his own eyes sting
and well. All the suffering he had witnessed over the previous days was
overflowing inside of him. “My God, what is the sin of these people?” he cried.
Madina’s liver and kidney had been badly lacerated. To survive, she needed an
immediate laparotomy. Esmat composed himself and began preparing for the
operation.
That night, according to the report, the K.K.A. commandos at the police
compound planned a raid on the abandoned headquarters of the National
Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, which had been
occupied by the Taliban. After dark, the insurgents’ daily assault on the
police compound had petered out, and the commandos planned to take three of
their wounded comrades back to the airport, resupply and then drive back into
the city toward the N.D.S. compound, on a northbound path that would take them
past the M.S.F. hospital.
The commandos asked Hutchinson to provide them with air support, and he replied
that he would take care of them. The AC-130 had already been on station above
Kunduz for three hours when, around 1 in the morning, Hutchinson informed the
gunship that the Afghan commandos were planning to raid the N.D.S. headquarters
and requested that the gunship perform a “defensive scan” of the area.
Hutchinson passed on the correct grid coordinates for the N.D.S. compound,
which had been given to him by the Afghans; but because the gunship was flying
higher than normal to avoid surface-¬to-¬air missiles, its navigation system
pointed the sensor — a powerful night-¬vision telescope, essentially — at an
empty field, located between the N.D.S. headquarters and the M.S.F. hospital.
Confused, the sensor operator scanned around and noticed a large facility
nearby with people walking around at night. He started observing it to
determine if this was the target. In fact, it was the hospital. The gunship
hadn’t been given the building’s coordinates before the mission, and although
the hospital had a flag with the M.S.F. logo on its roof, it wasn’t marked with
a red cross or a crescent.
The next step was crucial. Hutchinson, who had been conferring via an
interpreter with the K.K.A. ground force and couldn’t see the target himself,
then gave the AC-130 an “updated description of the compound of interest.” He
later told investigators that the Afghans described “a long T-¬shaped building
with a small offshoot.” He continued: “I can’t remember the word I would have
used for it. It’s a walled-¬in compound with multiple outbuildings, and there
was a gate facing to the north with an arch.”
That description didn’t resemble the N.D.S. headquarters. It matched the
hospital.
At 2 in the morning, the hospital was quiet. Most of the roughly 300 staff
members, patients and caretakers were asleep. In the operating theater, the
night shift of surgeons was taking advantage of a quiet day to carry out
follow-¬up operations. Esmat, who spent two hours operating on Madina, had
finished his shift at midnight and collapsed, exhausted, on a cot in the
outpatient department. He had been worried that she might die on the operating
table, but she pulled through.
Down the hall, Faizullah Alokozai, the archivist, was sound asleep next to the
hospital’s deputy medical director, Dr. Abdul Satar Zaheer. Shortly after 2 in
the morning, both men were woken by loud blasts and flashes of light. Realizing
they were under attack, the two jumped up and ran east toward the entrance to
the basement, into the high-¬ceilinged hallway outside the operating theater.
They didn’t know it, but they were running toward danger. The gunship had
started by hitting the intensive-¬care unit on the east end of the hospital and
was working its barrage west. Esmat, who stepped into the hallway behind them,
saw the passage suddenly fill with smoke, and he jumped out a window onto the
lawn, where he crawled and hid safely in a deep window well for the duration of
the attack.
As Faizullah and Satar reached the far side of the hallway, a shell punched
through the roof and exploded on the floor in front of them. They fell to the
ground. Satar’s right arm had been blown off at the shoulder. Faizullah could
feel his own hot blood gushing down his back. The power went out, and the
darkness was rent with flashes of lights.
Faizullah crawled up to Satar and held him. “I lost my right arm, please help
me,” his colleague cried. “I know,” Faizullah replied. “I’ll get you out, if
we’re alive. I’m not going to leave you.”
As they cowered, reciting the Islamic profession of faith, more shrapnel struck
them. Three times, Faizullah tried to stand them up, struggling with the bulky
Satar, whose legs seemed to be paralyzed, before another explosion would send
them sprawling. The sound of the blasts was the hardest thing to bear.
By the time the gunship’s fire moved on to another part of the hospital, the
air had filled with acrid smoke, and Faizullah could hear the sound of flames
licking the building. He got to his feet and pulled at Satar’s arm. He was limp
and silent. He’s dead, Faizullah thought, and I’ll die if I stay here.
In the darkness, he heard a voice. “Please forgive me for whatever happened,
because I’m going to die. Take care of my children.” Making his way forward,
Faizullah saw that it was the young emergency-¬room doctor, Amin, sitting in a
doorway, talking on his cellphone. His right leg was missing at the knee, and
blood was spurting and pooling underneath him.
“It’s going to catch fire!” Amin shouted, seeing Faizullah. “We have to get
out.” Amin heaved himself onto his remaining leg and hopped through the
smoke-¬filled emergency room, and Faizullah followed him out, through the
entrance into the covered driveway, where Amin clutched the row of pillars that
lined it. “I can’t move,” he gasped, and so Faizullah slung him over his back
and staggered out onto the front lawn of the hospital, where they collapsed in
the grass.
<img class="span-asset-img "
src="https://cdn1.nyt.com/images/2016/05/22/magazine/22kunduz4/22kunduz4-articleLarge-v3.jpg";
/>
Human remains after the attack at the hospital.
ANDREW QUILTY
As they looked back at the hospital, another round of shells struck the
driveway where they had just been standing, partly collapsing its roof. The
hospital was on fire now, its flames leaping up and setting tall pine trees
alight. The lawn was lit with its dancing orange flame. From inside, Faizullah
could hear the screams of people burning alive.
Sixteen service members have been disciplined for their role in the airstrike,
but the military has declined to pursue criminal charges. The military has
argued that while both the Special Forces and the AC-130 crew made serious
errors, and in doing so violated the Geneva Conventions, they were not guilty
of crimes because they had not known they were targeting a hospital. “The label
‘war crimes’ is typically reserved for intentional acts — intentional targeting
of civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects or locations,” Gen.
Joseph Votel said. Hutchinson was relieved of command and reprimanded, but he
was recently assigned as his battalion’s executive officer, according to
Representative Hunter’s office.
It is true, as the report states, that there was a pileup of mistakes and
technical problems, without any one of which the strike might have been
averted. An antenna that would have allowed the gunship to send video of its
target to the Special Forces, and to receive an email sent by its headquarters
with the M.S.F. hospital’s coordinates, stopped working shortly after takeoff.
Later, the Special Forces headquarters at Bagram sent a Predator drone to
observe the wrong N.D.S. location on the other side of the city, and as a
result wasn’t watching the strike when it started.
Most important, because the strike was carried out under the special
self-¬defense-¬of-¬others designation given to the Afghan commandos, it didn’t
have to be approved by anyone besides Hutchinson and the aircraft commander.
Hutchinson, who was inside the police compound, claimed that he thought he saw
the K.K.A. convoy nearby and then heard them come under machine-¬gun fire. In
fact, the report states, the convoy was still five and a half miles away from
the target and had not yet been attacked. The investigators concluded that
Hutchinson violated the rules of engagement and stated that his “version of
events surrounding his decision to authorize the strike is internally
inconsistent, implausible and contradicted by other available sources of
credible information.”
But Hutchinson was arguably only doing what he was asked to do by his
higher-¬ups: fight with Afghan forces to retake the city of Kunduz as quickly
as possible. “If someone must be held accountable, let it not be the man who
was ordered to sky-dive without being given a parachute,” a Green Beret officer
in Kunduz — his name is redacted — said, complaining of “moral cowardice” and
an “abject failure of leadership.”
As a result of the self-¬defense justification, an airstrike against a building
— which would normally have gone all the way to General Campbell for approval —
could be approved on the spot. These safeguards around airstrikes (which
succeeded in reducing civilian casualties from airstrikes, to 204 in 2012 from
353 in 2011, according to United Nations figures) were intended not only to
prevent simple errors or collateral damage but also to avoid acting on bad
intelligence provided by Afghan sources, who had in the past been careless in
passing on unverified rumor as fact, or even seeking to maliciously use
American air power to target their rivals.
This, in turn, raises the question of what targeting information was provided
by the Afghan forces. The military has focused on the N.D.S. headquarters’
coordinates, which the gunship’s targeting system mistakenly indicated as an
open field. But those grids were passed to the Special ¬Forces at 6 p.m., when
the Afghans informed them of their plan of attack for that night. When
Hutchinson asked them, seven hours later, after the confusion with the
gunship’s targeting system, about the compound to strike, they gave a
description of a “long T-¬shaped building” with a north-¬facing gate, which he
in turn passed to the gunship.
Maj. Gen. William Hickman, who led the military’s investigation, described this
as “an ambiguous physical description” that “appeared to match the M.S.F.
trauma center.” But it’s actually a rather specific description that
corresponds to M.S.F.’s distinctive layout. It does not at all resemble the
N.D.S. headquarters, which is a trapezoidal compound with a south-¬facing gate
and two main rectangular buildings facing each other across a cramped courtyard.
Indeed, according to the report, when the AC-130 returned to a normal altitude,
the sensor operator, worried that the navigation system had failed earlier,
tried punching in the original grid coordinates, and this time it aimed his
sensor at the N.D.S. headquarters. The crew members then did a “side-by-side
comparison” of the N.D.S. and M.S.F. sites using both of their sensors, but
based on Hutchinson’s description, they decided that they were 100 percent
confident that the T-¬shaped building was their target.
Hutchinson and the other Special Forces on the ground later told investigators
that the Afghans had a second target that night, in addition to the N.D.S.
headquarters. They all claimed not to know or recall what exactly it was.
“There was actually two targets they said they were going to hit, but they
didn’t even have a location for the other one, so we didn’t concern ourselves
much with it,” Hutchinson said. Another Green Beret said the Afghans had
provided two sets of coordinates, one for the N.D.S. headquarters and the
second for what was described as an insurgent command-¬and-¬control location,
but he didn’t know precisely what the other grid referred to. “I don’t recall
and don’t want to speculate,” said a third, who claimed to have passed both
grids to the aircraft. A member of the gunship crew also said they received
“multiple grids” that night.
Could the second target have been the hospital? Did Afghan forces, influenced
by their longstanding animosity for M.S.F., believe that it had become a
Taliban headquarters and needed to be taken out? Unless their findings have
been redacted, the military’s investigators seemed not to have probed these
questions.
When I interviewed them in November, none of the Afghan forces would claim
responsibility for passing on the description to the Special Forces. Yaftali,
the K.K.A. commander, said that the decision to strike the hospital was made by
the United States and that it was unfortunate but justified. “They were firing
R.P.G.s at us from the direction of the hospital,” he said.
“The Americans were aware that they were firing from there,” said Captain
Munib, an Afghan commando who was partnered with American forces in Kunduz. The
K.K.A. “had reported to them that the Taliban were there, and then they hit
it.” (Independent investigations have revealed no evidence to suggest that
armed Taliban fighters were inside the hospital or firing from nearby.)
In fairness, much like their American partners, the Afghan special forces sent
up from Kabul were reliant on information from local sources, who had
longstanding views about M.S.F.’s role in Kunduz. “That hospital is in the
service of the Taliban,” Gard said when I visited him in Kunduz. “I swear to
God, if they make it a hundred times, we’ll destroy it a hundred times.”
Is there still a place in today’s wars for a hospital to treat all sides? On
May 3, denouncing a pattern of attacks against medical facilities in conflict
zones, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2286, which
called for an end to impunity for those responsible. Oddly, some of the
individuals seated around the Security Council’s horseshoe-¬shaped table
represented countries involved in these strikes.
In Yemen, for example, the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and supported
with American and British intelligence and weaponry has repeatedly struck
medical facilities; it bombed an M.S.F. clinic on Oct. 26, despite having been
provided with its coordinates. In Syria, M.S.F. does not provide coordinates of
the medical facilities it supports to the Assad regime or the Russian forces
backing it, out of fear that the information will be used to target them. Aid
and human rights groups have accused both governments of deliberately attacking
medical facilities, including an M.S.F.-¬supported hospital in northern Syria
on Feb. 15, an accusation they have denied.
“Can we provide treatment to whoever you consider to be your enemy?” said
Jonathan Whittall, M.S.F.’s head of humanitarian analysis. “When you look at
the track record of the last few months, when four out of the five permanent
members of the Security Council have been involved in bombing M.S.F.
facilities, it’s a question that we urgently need to have answered.”
In Afghanistan, health facilities remain under threat, both by the Taliban —
who frequently commit war crimes like indiscriminately attacking civilians —
and by the Afghan government. According to the United Nations, on Feb. 18,
Afghan police commandos stormed into a clinic run by the Swedish Committee for
Afghanistan and executed two patients and a teenage caretaker who were
suspected of being insurgents. Jorgen Holmstrom, the S.C.A.’s country director,
told me that the commandos belonged to the 333 Battalion — the same unit that
raided the M.S.F. hospital last July and participated in the battle for Kunduz
— and were accompanied by British troops. (A spokesman for Resolute Support
stated that its investigation found “absolutely no evidence to support that
allegation” of executions and declined to comment on which units were present.)
In Kunduz, the hospital remains in ruins, and its staff has struggled to make
sense of what happened. Faizullah, the archivist, survived, but his young
friend Amin did not. “Whenever I went to sleep for two minutes, I was just
seeing the bombing and the killing and the dead bodies,” Faizullah said. Once
the airstrike ended, Esmat tried to suture Amin’s severed femoral artery on a
makeshift operating table, but to no avail. Madina, the little girl, lived
through Esmat’s operation but not the bombing. Her family found her two days
afterward and buried her with her big sister. “We tried to save her, but she
died,” Esmat said, picking his way through the rubble. “She died, and she
burned.” The walls around us still stood, but the roof was open to the gray
winter sky.
Editor’s note: The United States military initially declined to comment and
referred questions to the Afghan government, which also declined to comment.
After this article went to press, Peter Cook, the Pentagon’s spokesman, said in
a statement: “The comprehensive investigation that followed the Kunduz tragedy
determined that all members of both the ground force and the AC-130 aircrew
were unaware that the aircraft was firing on a medical facility throughout the
engagement. The investigation ultimately concluded that this tragic incident
was caused by a combination of human errors, compounded by process and
equipment failures.”
Matthieu Aikins is a Schell fellow at the Nation Institute and has been
reporting from Afghanistan since 2008. He has twice been a finalist for the
National Magazine Award and won a 2013 George Polk Award.
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Dr. Esmatullah Esmat, who survived the bombing.
Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
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For the last hour, the American gunship had been circling high above the city,
carefully observing its target with night-vision sensors and waiting for
clearance to strike. It was 2 in the morning on Oct. 3, 2015, and Kunduz City
was enveloped in total darkness. The city’s power had gone out five days before
— soon after the Taliban took over the provincial capital, in a humiliating
blow to the American and Afghan governments — and it stayed off through the
bitter fighting that followed, as commandos from both nations counterattacked.
The aircraft’s target, a distinctively T-shaped building set on an expansive
lawn, was lit by generators, a beacon in the blacked-out city. As they
prepared to fire, the gunship’s crew members radioed to the ground force
commander, a United States Army Special Forces major, for more information.
“Looking for confirmation on which building to strike — Confirm it is the
large, T-shaped building ... in the center of the compound.
Affirm.”
An AC-130 circles its target like a ball swung from a string, raining down
gunfire along the radius. At 2:08 a.m., the gunship began its assault, starting
on the eastern end of the T-shaped building and working methodically west. For
half an hour, the AC-130 fired its 105-millimeter howitzer, the largest
airborne gun in existence, and its 40-millimeter Bofors cannon, which shoots
exploding incendiary rounds and is ideal for hunting people who flee targeted
buildings by foot, often referred to by pilots as “squirters.” There were about
50 squirters at the site, the crew noted, a surprisingly high number. Through
the infrared scope, the building glowed as it burned, while ghostly shapes that
flitted from inside were gunned down.
“We started a fire, good effects.”
At roughly the same time, 150 miles south in Kabul, Guilhem Molinie, the head
of the Afghan mission for Doctors Without Borders, known by its French
initials, M.S.F., was woken by a phone call: His hospital in Kunduz was
burning. A few minutes later, he received a chilling update: It was being
bombed from the air. That could mean only an American or Afghan attack. He
began frantically calling the United States military, the United Nations,
anyone who might be able to make it stop. At 2:19 a.m., he spoke to an officer
at the Army Special Forces headquarters at Bagram Air Base, who said he would
investigate. The airstrike would continue for an additional 18 minutes. The
officer later texted Molinie: “I’ll do my best, praying for you all.”
By the time the sun rose, the hospital’s main building was a smoldering ruin.
It had been leveled with devastating precision; the other buildings on the
compound, some no more than a few dozen feet away, were left unharmed.
According to M.S.F., at least 42 people were killed in the attack and dozens
injured. It was among the most shocking massacres in the American-led war in
Afghanistan, and certainly the most baffling. Why would an American warplane
destroy a working hospital full of doctors and patients?
On April 29, seven months after the bombing, the United States military
released a heavily redacted version of its investigation into the airstrike.
The report asserts that it was an accident, a result of equipment failures and
bad decisions on the part of the gunship crew and the Special Forces. “The
investigation concluded that the personnel involved did not know they were
striking a medical facility,” Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of the military’s
Central Command, said at a news conference. “They were absolutely trying to do
the right thing.”
Even taken at face value, the report reveals more than a simple error. The
circumstances that led to the destruction of the hospital are a direct result
of how the Special Forces were made to bear the weight of the United States’
contradictory strategy in Afghanistan, which seeks to both end its involvement
in the war and prop up the struggling Afghan government. Restricted to a
supposedly noncombat role as advisers, the Special Forces in Kunduz ended up
calling in the airstrike, which was in support of Afghan troops against a
target a quarter-mile away, as self-defense, which meant that it bypassed many
safeguards intended to prevent civilian casualties.
Moreover, there is evidence — both buried in the report and from interviews
conducted on the front lines in Kunduz — that suggests that Afghan troops may
have deliberately provided the hospital as a target. Though the Special Forces
later said they were unaware that it was the hospital, the redacted
investigation documents show that they passed a description that matched the
M.S.F. compound to the AC-130 as a target — a fact that the military elides in
its summary of the bombing. This description originated from their Afghan
partners. In my conversations with them in November in the aftermath of the
bombing, some of the Afghan forces in Kunduz, citing false intelligence that
the hospital had been taken over by insurgents, said that it had been
justifiably targeted.
Both the American military and the Afghan government declined to comment on
whether Afghan forces had intended to target the hospital. But a question hangs
over the Kunduz bombing, even as the military has moved to declare the matter
settled: Did Afghan forces, out of longstanding mistrust of M.S.F., draw the
United States into a terrible tragedy?
When Maj. Michael Hutchinson, known to his friends as Hutch, redeployed last
year to Afghanistan, he was sure — as he later told military investigators —
that getting outside the wire to engage in combat was mostly a thing of the
past. The Americans were there to train, advise and assist the Afghans. It was
their war now. The American combat mission in Afghanistan had ended in 2014, as
announced by President Obama in a Rose Garden speech that year. The remaining
American forces were supposed to be restricted to two narrow roles: A noncombat
NATO training mission, called Resolute Support, was there to advise Afghan
forces, while the American counterterrorism force under Freedom’s Sentinel was
charged with targeting Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. “The U.S. military will
not be engaged in specific operations targeting members of the Taliban just
because they’re members of the Taliban,” Josh Earnest, the White House
spokesman, told reporters in 2014.
But as the Afghan government has begun to lose ground against the Taliban,
United States forces have found themselves pulled back into combat. Since the
new missions began in 2015, at least 87 American military personnel have been
killed or wounded in action. Much of that fighting has fallen to Special
Operations units like Hutchinson’s company, which was assigned responsibility
for northern Afghanistan under a task force led by the First Battalion, Third
Special Forces Group. (Hutchinson’s name is redacted in the military’s report,
but he is referred to throughout as “the G.F.C.,” for ground force commander.
His identity was confirmed by Joe Kasper, Representative Duncan Hunter’s chief
of staff, who has been in contact with Special Forces who were in Kunduz. The
military declined to comment on Hutchinson’s role or make him available for an
interview.)
From the start, Hutchinson had been wary of Kunduz and its messy politics.
“Ironically, I probably jinxed myself on this,” he later told military
investigators. “I said I did not believe that we should get involved in Kunduz
any further than [training and advising] unless the provincial capital falls,
because structurally it is such a political and ethnic problem. It’s not
something that we can effectively weigh in on.”
Kunduz, a fertile wedge of rice and wheat fields tucked between the foothills
of the Hindu Kush mountains and the Amu Darya river basin, is one of the
provinces where the Taliban have made their biggest inroads in recent years.
Yet in the months leading up to the fall of the city, neither the Americans nor
the Afghans seemed particularly worried about its stability. On Aug. 13, Brig.
Gen. Wilson Shoffner, the United States military’s spokesman in Afghanistan,
was asked about the situation there during a news conference. “I think there’s
been a lot of generalization when it comes to reports on the north,” he said.
“Kunduz is — is not now and has not been in danger of being overrun by the
Taliban.”
Roughly six weeks later, around 3 in the morning on Sept. 28, Taliban fighters
attacked the city’s outskirts on three fronts. “The mujahedeen were united
under one command,” said a Taliban commander who took part in the offensive and
goes by the name Shahid. He spoke by phone from outside the city in the weeks
after the attack. “We broke our enemy.” Though Kunduz City was home to
thousands of Afghan army, police and intelligence personnel, its defenses
quickly collapsed, the officers fleeing in disarray to the airport on a plateau
overlooking the city. Within hours of their initial assault, the Taliban were
freely roaming the streets, looting the abandoned bases of weapons, secret
documents, Ford pickup trucks, Humvees and even two old Soviet-made T-62
tanks. Thousands of residents jammed the highways as they fled to neighboring
cities; meanwhile, hordes of Taliban fighters, some from surrounding provinces,
streamed into the city, attracted by the prospect of a major victory. It was
the first time since 2001 that the Taliban had captured a provincial capital.
As panic spread across northern Afghanistan, the Special Forces were tapped to
help save Afghanistan’s fifth-largest city. There was already one group called
an Operational Detachment Alpha — an “A team” of 12 Green Berets, plus some
support troops, including joint terminal attack controllers, who direct
airstrikes — based at the Kunduz airport. An additional Operational Detachment
Alpha, plus four operators from a third one, were sent up from Bagram, the main
American military base north of Kabul. They arrived around 6 in the morning on
Sept. 29, a little more than 12 hours after the city fell. Hutchinson was put
in command of the entire force.
Afghan reinforcements were also flown in, including a contingent of police
special forces and about 200 soldiers from the Afghan Army’s most elite unit,
the Special Operations Force, which was also known by its Pashto initials,
K.K.A., and was formerly attached to the United States military’s secretive
Joint Special Operations Command.
These coalition troops confronted a scene of total chaos: thousands of security
forces and civilian officials clamoring for space on the few evacuation flights
available, some casting aside their uniforms and weapons on the road. When the
Taliban attacked the airport plateau that evening, the defenders began fleeing
the perimeter, but the Special Forces called in airstrikes, which hammered the
insurgent forces, breaking their offensive and leaving dozens of dead fighters
scattered through the arid hills. “If the Americans hadn’t intervened,” said
Col. Abdullah Gard, then the head of the Kunduz police’s quick-reaction force,
“the airport would have fallen.”
Earlier that same day, a Toyota Corolla pulled up to the main entrance of the
Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz. “There was a big fat guy driving,”
said an M.S.F. employee who was on duty at the time. “Someone told me he’s the
big boss of the Taliban.” It was Janat Gul, one of the most powerful Taliban
leaders in northern Afghanistan. With him was Abdul Salam, the “shadow
governor” responsible for Kunduz. Salam and Gul got out and went inside, the
employee recalled — unarmed as per the hospital’s strict no-weapons policy —
to meet with expatriate staff members. (Doctors Without Borders confirmed
Salam’s visit that day but said he didn’t enter the hospital.)
According to Molinie, who was monitoring events from Kabul, the Taliban
leadership pledged full cooperation and protection and asked that the hospital
stay operational during whatever fighting was to come. “The message was that we
could continue our activities, that we would be safe and protected and that the
patients of the hospital would be safe and protected,” said Molinie, “as well
as the patients from government forces.” The hospital staff activated the
mass-casualty plan and readied for the flood of patients that would soon
arrive.
For M.S.F., dealing with the Taliban was a routine part of the neutral role it
seeks to maintain in Afghanistan. One of the world’s largest medical charities,
M.S.F. sees itself as an impartial humanitarian organization in the mold of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, one that could cross front lines to
provide treatment to anyone who needed it, including wounded combatants.
That role has been getting harder to play. M.S.F. has been active in
Afghanistan since 1980 and had worked with both the mujahedeen and Taliban
governments. But after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, its ethos of political
neutrality contrasted sharply with that of the Global War on Terror, where you
were either with the United States and its allies or with the terrorists.
Afghan forces have been especially resentful of the fact that as patients,
insurgents in M.S.F. facilities are entitled to the protection of international
law.
In 2004, five M.S.F. staff members were shot in an unsolved murder. A Taliban
spokesman claimed responsibility, accusing the organization of serving American
interests. But according to M.S.F., Afghan officials presented them with
credible evidence that local forces were actually responsible. No action was
taken against them by the government, and the organization pulled out of the
country.
When M.S.F. returned to Afghanistan in 2009, it followed the example of the Red
Cross and negotiated its access in the field with the Taliban leadership. Eager
for the help of humanitarian groups in responding to the worsening conflict,
the United States and Afghan governments acquiesced. “The initial deal with the
Afghan government, with NATO and the U.S.,” Molinie said, “was that we would
reopen a mission on the condition that all parties would accept that we talk to
everybody.”
But balancing the demands of belligerents in a ruthless war was fraught with
risk. In its zeal to help Afghans trapped behind the Taliban’s lines, M.S.F.
risked souring its relationship with the Afghan government. One of its more
ambitious plans called for opening a hospital in the Taliban-held northern
part of Helmand Province, along with an airstrip to fly in international staff
members and medical supplies behind insurgent lines. “Personally, I thought the
idea was completely insane,” said a Western official who was briefed on the
proposal last year. “The Afghan government would have reacted strongly against
M.S.F.”
In 2011, M.S.F. opened the hospital in Kunduz, a location it chose because it
believed, presciently, that the province’s bloody past presaged a violent
future. But some members of the Afghan government and security forces there had
little respect for M.S.F.’s neutrality and resented its treatment of wounded
Taliban. When I visited Kunduz in November, their anger was still surprisingly
raw, despite the recent destruction of the hospital. “They give them medicine;
they transport and treat their injured,” Gard, the commander of the
quick-reaction force, told me. “Their existence is a big problem for us.” And
though the hospital treated many more wounded for the government, there were
rumors that M.S.F. had carried out unnecessary amputations on them, according
to Fawzia Yaftali, a member of the provincial council. “The general perception
was that M.S.F. supported the Taliban,” she said.
On July 1, an episode occurred that should have been, in retrospect, a warning
sign for all involved. A team of Afghan police commandos from elite units
mentored by United States and NATO special forces — the 222 and 333 Battalions,
which were later part of the Afghan forces sent to Kunduz with the Green Berets
— had arrived in Kunduz Province to track a high-value target, a militant
commander named Abu Huzaifa. After targeting Huzaifa in an airstrike, the
commandos believed that he had been wounded and taken to the M.S.F. hospital in
Kunduz City. They drove there and forced their way inside, where they
physically assaulted the staff members and fired their weapons into the air,
according to M.S.F. Huzaifa was nowhere to be found.
“It was a kind of wild intrusion,” Molinie said. After M.S.F. phoned the
governor and the police chief, the commandos were called off. Furious that the
sanctity of the hospital had been violated, M.S.F. closed it to new admissions
for five days, until officials received guarantees from Kabul that it would be
respected. Huzaifa would be killed seven weeks later — by an American drone,
according to a senior Afghan special forces commander — but bitterness about
the hospital raid lingered among the Kunduz security forces. “They hid him,”
Gard told me, without offering any evidence. His men had accompanied the police
commandos to the hospital. “The people who work there are traitors, all of
them.”
On Wednesday, Sept. 30, the day after the Taliban’s assault on the airport was
beaten back, Hutchinson started planning an operation to retake the city. The
political pressure to do so was made apparent when, before his departure,
Hutchinson, along with an Afghan general, spoke by videoconference with Gen.
John Campbell, then the commander of American forces in Afghanistan. Campbell,
who was in Kabul, was not happy with the Afghans. “General Campbell was
understandably upset,” Hutchinson told investigators. “Not only was it a shock
and travesty that they had” — what follows is redacted in the military’s report
but seems to refer to how Afghan forces abandoned Kunduz City without a fight.
The fall of Kunduz had called into question the viability of Obama’s strategy
in Afghanistan, and storm clouds were gathering in Washington, where Campbell
had previously been scheduled to testify before Congress. “He was very much in
a hurry to get back to D.C.,” Hutchinson says in the report. “He had a lot on
his plate.” (Campbell, who is now retired, declined to comment for this
article.)
After the video conference, Hutchinson briefed his men on what the four-star
general told him. This was a strategically vital mission, and the whole world
was watching. “It had to happen as soon as possible. Failure was not an option
on this operation.”
The operation fit awkwardly under Resolute Support, the noncombat training
mission, and Freedom’s Sentinel, which was supposed to engage only ISIS and Al
Qaeda, not the Taliban. Indeed, while Hutchinson had submitted his operation
plan to his headquarters at Bagram under Resolute Support, it came back
approved under Freedom’s Sentinel. Later, Hutchinson told investigators that he
thought he was operating under Resolute Support’s rules of engagement.
The distinction between the two — which were both led by Campbell — would
become almost meaningless in Kunduz. The same unit could be carrying out a
training mission one minute and a counterterrorism one the next. According to
the military, in the first four days of fighting in Kunduz, 13 airstrikes were
conducted under Resolute Support and nine under Freedom’s Sentinel. Before
conducting strikes, aircrews would sometimes radio to ask under which mission
they were about to shoot.
The plan Hutchinson submitted, called Kunduz Clearing Patrol, was a risky
mission to strike deep into the city, where his men and the Afghan commandos
would take over the police and governor’s compound and set up a forward
stronghold. Hutchinson later admitted that he had underestimated the number of
Taliban in the city as “a small group of dedicated individuals.” The Green
Berets planned to stay for only 24 hours, long enough for the local Afghan
forces at the airport to rally and return to the city. “I really thought that
the Afghans would see that it wasn’t that big of a deal and they would all come
back in,” he said in the report. “We all agreed it had to happen fast, and the
only people who were willing to go in, unfortunately, were people who did not
know the city of Kunduz.”
That same Wednesday night, around 10:30, according to the report, the Green
Berets, accompanied by the Afghan police and army commandos, as well as Gard’s
quick-reaction force, rolled out of the airfield in a convoy of armored
vehicles and fought their way into the city. First they cleared Gard’s
compound, which the insurgents had captured the day before. They were hit by
repeated Taliban ambushes and called in airstrikes from a circling AC-130
gunship, killing dozens of insurgents. While entering the police compound, they
set off a tripwire bomb, but no one was hurt. The Afghan and American commandos
posted guards on the walls and set up a base inside. A Humvee with a single
small-scale map of Kunduz spread over its hood served as the Special Forces’
command post.
The city around them was still swarming with insurgents. When the sun rose, the
attacks began. Hoping to overrun the police compound’s defenders, the Taliban
launched relentless assaults from the surrounding buildings, sometimes getting
close enough for the Green Berets to use grenades. As the insurgents rained
rockets and machine-gun fire on the compound’s barriers, the Special Forces
called in six “danger close” gun runs from F-16s, the strikes near enough to
risk friendly fire. Still, the insurgents kept coming. “I was in a lot of
effective firefights,” one of the Green Berets later wrote, “but this was on a
completely different level than even any of the experienced special operators
on any of the detachments had seen — particularly over such a sustained period
of time. How no one was killed, or even wounded, is an absolute miracle.”
/images/100000004410309/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html/images/100000004410309/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html
The Kunduz hospital after the attack.
Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
An Afghan force of 500 was supposed to show up the next day from the airport to
relieve them; it never did. When a few Afghan police and army personnel did
arrive, they said they would abandon their positions if the Americans left. It
soon became apparent to Hutchinson and his men that their 24-hour mission was
going to last longer.
By sending the Special Forces to hold an isolated position deep inside a city
held by the Taliban, the American military allowed the Afghan government to
claim a badly needed propaganda victory. On Oct. 1, as the Green Berets and the
Afghan commandos fought for their lives at the police compound, President
Ashraf Ghani held a news conference in Kabul to declare that all of Kunduz City
had been retaken. “Thank God we had no fatalities,” he said. (In fact, the
battle to recapture the city would rage for two more weeks, and at least 38
Afghan police officers and soldiers would be killed.)
The fact that the Special Forces were surrounded by Taliban also meant that the
liberal use of American air power in Kunduz could be justified as
self-defense. The military went further by applying what it called Persons
With Designated Special Status to the Afghan commandos in Kunduz, a designation
that allows American forces to consider temporarily defending certain partnered
Afghan troops as part of their own self-defense — essentially, self-defense
of someone else.
Later, investigators would conclude that Hutchinson had improperly used these
self-defense rules in order to launch offensive “pre-assault fires.” It was
his response, perhaps, to the conundrum he faced by engaging in combat during a
supposedly noncombat mission: Was he supposed to wait for the commandos to get
pinned down or take casualties before striking the insurgents they had been
sent into the city to fight? “I can’t expect them to assault that,” he told
investigators, referring to the K.K.A.’s subsequent attack on the Taliban-held
intelligence headquarters. “They can’t sit out there and die on the road.”
Armed with this authorization and ordered to take back the city of Kunduz, the
Special Forces called in air support for the Afghan commandos, who, taking
advantage of their superior night-vision capabilities, would set out from the
police compound to raid Taliban positions around the city at night. “Where
there was heavy pressure on us,” said Yaftali, the K.K.A. commander, “wherever
there was heavy fighting, we told the Americans to strike there.”
In a city where all other institutions had been abandoned by their staff, the
M.S.F. hospital was a lifeline for the people of Kunduz. Dr. Esmatullah Esmat
had been a surgeon for eight years in Afghanistan, but he had never witnessed
anything like this. “When I saw my patients after surgery and they would say,
‘Dr. Esmat, you saved me,’ I felt energy,” he said. “We never felt tired.” A
stoop-shouldered, stocky man with a shy smile, Esmat and his fellow surgeons
worked in alternating 12-hour shifts. Over five days, the hospital would
receive 376 patients in its emergency room, more than a quarter of them women
and children. Esmat had to amputate the leg of a 3-year-old girl. “I have a
daughter the same age,” he said.
It was a bloody and chaotic scene. In the red room, the most critical cases
were prepped — head and torso wounds, or traumatic amputations, typically — and
then sent immediately into one of the hospital’s three operating theaters.
There, stripped naked under the surgeon’s lamp, Taliban fighters, civilians and
government soldiers alike became patients whose lives needed to be saved. Esmat
and his colleagues performed 138 operations during those days, almost a third
of them emergency laparotomies — the abdomen was cut open and internal organs
were piled on the chest, so that the surgical team could go through them,
painstaking inch by inch, looking for lacerations to suture.
As the wards overflowed, the staff laid down mattresses between the beds and in
the hallways and stretched the 90-bed hospital to fit 130. There were gruesome
and strange sights, like the Taliban fighter from a commando unit, in a
distinctive camouflage-pattern robe, weeping uncontrollably while stroking the
head of his body-bagged friend. “It was a bit hopeless,” said Faizullah
Alokozai, the hospital’s archivist. “I saw a lot of dead children.”
Though the M.S.F. hospital was crowded with fighters, whether patients or
caretakers (each patient was allowed one), staff members and civilians who were
present said the insurgents respected the rules. They left their weapons
outside or handed them over at the gun lockers at the entrance. One employee
recalled seeing a fighter give up his weapon but forget his ammunition vest;
when the employee nervously approached the fighter about it, the man apologized
profusely and handed it over. “We had respect for the hospital, as they were
serving the people,” said Shahid, the Taliban commander. “I myself went there
once when one of our men was wounded, and before entering we submitted our
weapons outside.”
M.S.F. did allow caretakers and patients to keep their cellphones, however, and
I was told by several staff members and civilians present that some Taliban
caretakers also brought in hand-held radios. (Molinie said that while there was
no specific rule against radios, he didn’t believe that they were allowed in.)
According to M.S.F., some of the Taliban patients were high-ranking leaders.
Taliban vehicles were also allowed inside the hospital grounds to drop off
critically injured patients.
Unknown to M.S.F., Afghan forces in Kunduz were coming to the false conclusion
that the hospital was being used as a Taliban stronghold and headquarters,
which would have meant the loss of its protected status. “All their most
important leaders were inside the hospital, especially Tajiks, Uzbeks and
high-ranking Pakistanis,” Gard said. He claimed his information came from
local informants who had been inside the hospital and witnessed the Taliban
operating there. “They had raised their flag and established their headquarters
there.”
These unconfirmed reports were lent additional weight by signals intelligence.
Yaftali, the K.K.A. commander, told me that his unit’s Wolfhound radio
direction finders, which allowed them to determine the range and bearing of
enemy radios, picked up Taliban transmissions from inside the hospital. “We
located about 10 to 15 radios from there,” he said. “The Taliban were inside
and outside the hospital.”
The Afghan forces I spoke to said they relayed these reports to the American
military, and it’s clear that, before the strike, some Americans were aware of
the concerns that the M.S.F. hospital had been taken over by the Taliban. On
Oct. 1, Carter Malkasian, a civilian adviser to the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, emailed M.S.F. in New York to ask about the
safety of its staff and whether Taliban fighters were “holed up” inside the
hospital.
Maj. Gen. Mark Quantock, Campbell’s intelligence deputy, told investigators:
“Although we assessed that there were Taliban using the hospital, you cannot
shoot up a building under the current authorities. Period.”
Molinie, M.S.F.’s head of mission in Kabul, said he was then unaware of the
American military’s suspicions, which he criticized as baseless. On Sept. 29,
he provided Resolute Support with GPS coordinates for four of M.S.F.’s
facilities in Kunduz, including the hospital, as a precaution. And the day
before the bombing, he coordinated the delivery of three truckloads of medical
supplies to Kunduz with an officer at the Special Forces’ headquarters at
Bagram. “He informed me of the number of beds, number of international aid
workers in the hospital, and that the Taliban were ‘protecting’ the hospital
and were treating the government casualties well,” the officer later wrote.
It’s unclear from the report what, if anything, the Special Forces on the
ground in Kunduz knew about the M.S.F. hospital. Several staff members at their
headquarters at Bagram told investigators that they had passed M.S.F.’s grid
coordinates on two separate occasions to the Green Berets at the police
compound. “I know I read the four grids and got a read-back for accuracy,” one
person wrote. “I think I used the term ‘Doctors Without Borders,’ not ‘M.S.F.’
” Hutchinson and other members of his team, however, said they never received
the coordinates from Bagram and were unaware of the hospital’s location before
the strike, a contention the investigators accepted in their final report.
But whether they heard the Afghans’ false reports before or after the strike,
some of the Green Berets in Kunduz appeared to believe them. “There were enemy
in there,” one later wrote, according to an email excerpt provided by
Representative Hunter’s office. “They were using it as a [command and control]
node. They had already removed and ransomed the foreign doctors, and they had
fired on partnered personnel from there.”
/images/100000004410310/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html/images/100000004410310/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html
Ismail Zahir (right), with his father and brothers. His sisters Morsal and
Madina died at the hospital.
Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
For the civilians who remained in Kunduz during the fighting — the United
Nations estimates that 13,000 families were displaced by the fighting and that
848 civilians were killed or injured — life was a daily struggle to survive.
There was no electricity, and the price of basics like bread and cooking oil
had shot up, for those who could find them at all. Heading out in search of
supplies meant risking your life in the crossfire on the streets. But for
people like Ismail Zahir, a floppy-haired, soft-spoken 20-year-old who worked
in construction, there was no other choice. With his father deaf and disabled,
his family relied on their eldest son as their breadwinner. When there were
lulls in the fighting, Ismail would head out into the street, dodging sniper
fire. “I was afraid,” he said, “but not as afraid as I was for my family.”
Once Afghan and American forces counterattacked and airstrikes began hitting
the city, he grew especially worried for his sisters Morsal and Madina. Morsal,
15, was quiet and fastidious like him, while Madina, at 5 the youngest in the
family, was impish and apple-cheeked. At night, they screamed in fear when
bombs struck nearby. They begged the family to leave Kunduz.
Finally, on Oct. 2, the fourth day after the fall of Kunduz, Ismail and a
friend set off across the city to find a car to hire, riding tandem on a
borrowed bicycle through the deserted streets. Taliban fighters stopped them at
a checkpoint but let them pass — civilians were free to flee if they wished. On
the outskirts of the city, they found a taxi driver. He wanted the equivalent
of $200 to take them to Kabul, five times as much as the normal rate, and they
had no choice but to accept.
Returning home with the driver, he and his friend packed their families into
the Toyota station wagon, 14 people in total, most of them women and children.
The driver set off south, toward Kabul. As they came around a corner, they
spotted an Afghan Army armored vehicle. Perhaps thinking they were insurgents,
it opened fire. As the driver wheeled around, bullets tore through the back of
the car. Four of the boys were shot in the arms and legs, but the two girls,
Morsal and Madina, were the most grievously wounded. Somehow, the car made it
to the M.S.F. hospital.
When Esmat arrived in the red room, he found Morsal laid out, pale and
beautiful. She was dead from a head wound. Madina’s abdomen was torn open, and
her intestines protruded, but she was still conscious and cried out, “Mother,
mother.” As Esmat looked around and saw Amin Bajawri, the emergency-room
doctor, and the rest of the staff members weeping, he felt his own eyes sting
and well. All the suffering he had witnessed over the previous days was
overflowing inside of him. “My God, what is the sin of these people?” he cried.
Madina’s liver and kidney had been badly lacerated. To survive, she needed an
immediate laparotomy. Esmat composed himself and began preparing for the
operation.
That night, according to the report, the K.K.A. commandos at the police
compound planned a raid on the abandoned headquarters of the National
Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, which had been
occupied by the Taliban. After dark, the insurgents’ daily assault on the
police compound had petered out, and the commandos planned to take three of
their wounded comrades back to the airport, resupply and then drive back into
the city toward the N.D.S. compound, on a northbound path that would take them
past the M.S.F. hospital.
The commandos asked Hutchinson to provide them with air support, and he replied
that he would take care of them. The AC-130 had already been on station above
Kunduz for three hours when, around 1 in the morning, Hutchinson informed the
gunship that the Afghan commandos were planning to raid the N.D.S. headquarters
and requested that the gunship perform a “defensive scan” of the area.
Hutchinson passed on the correct grid coordinates for the N.D.S. compound,
which had been given to him by the Afghans; but because the gunship was flying
higher than normal to avoid surface-to-air missiles, its navigation system
pointed the sensor — a powerful night-vision telescope, essentially — at an
empty field, located between the N.D.S. headquarters and the M.S.F. hospital.
Confused, the sensor operator scanned around and noticed a large facility
nearby with people walking around at night. He started observing it to
determine if this was the target. In fact, it was the hospital. The gunship
hadn’t been given the building’s coordinates before the mission, and although
the hospital had a flag with the M.S.F. logo on its roof, it wasn’t marked with
a red cross or a crescent.
The next step was crucial. Hutchinson, who had been conferring via an
interpreter with the K.K.A. ground force and couldn’t see the target himself,
then gave the AC-130 an “updated description of the compound of interest.” He
later told investigators that the Afghans described “a long T-shaped building
with a small offshoot.” He continued: “I can’t remember the word I would have
used for it. It’s a walled-in compound with multiple outbuildings, and there
was a gate facing to the north with an arch.”
That description didn’t resemble the N.D.S. headquarters. It matched the
hospital.
At 2 in the morning, the hospital was quiet. Most of the roughly 300 staff
members, patients and caretakers were asleep. In the operating theater, the
night shift of surgeons was taking advantage of a quiet day to carry out
follow-up operations. Esmat, who spent two hours operating on Madina, had
finished his shift at midnight and collapsed, exhausted, on a cot in the
outpatient department. He had been worried that she might die on the operating
table, but she pulled through.
Down the hall, Faizullah Alokozai, the archivist, was sound asleep next to the
hospital’s deputy medical director, Dr. Abdul Satar Zaheer. Shortly after 2 in
the morning, both men were woken by loud blasts and flashes of light. Realizing
they were under attack, the two jumped up and ran east toward the entrance to
the basement, into the high-ceilinged hallway outside the operating theater.
They didn’t know it, but they were running toward danger. The gunship had
started by hitting the intensive-care unit on the east end of the hospital and
was working its barrage west. Esmat, who stepped into the hallway behind them,
saw the passage suddenly fill with smoke, and he jumped out a window onto the
lawn, where he crawled and hid safely in a deep window well for the duration of
the attack.
As Faizullah and Satar reached the far side of the hallway, a shell punched
through the roof and exploded on the floor in front of them. They fell to the
ground. Satar’s right arm had been blown off at the shoulder. Faizullah could
feel his own hot blood gushing down his back. The power went out, and the
darkness was rent with flashes of lights.
Faizullah crawled up to Satar and held him. “I lost my right arm, please help
me,” his colleague cried. “I know,” Faizullah replied. “I’ll get you out, if
we’re alive. I’m not going to leave you.”
As they cowered, reciting the Islamic profession of faith, more shrapnel struck
them. Three times, Faizullah tried to stand them up, struggling with the bulky
Satar, whose legs seemed to be paralyzed, before another explosion would send
them sprawling. The sound of the blasts was the hardest thing to bear.
By the time the gunship’s fire moved on to another part of the hospital, the
air had filled with acrid smoke, and Faizullah could hear the sound of flames
licking the building. He got to his feet and pulled at Satar’s arm. He was limp
and silent. He’s dead, Faizullah thought, and I’ll die if I stay here.
In the darkness, he heard a voice. “Please forgive me for whatever happened,
because I’m going to die. Take care of my children.” Making his way forward,
Faizullah saw that it was the young emergency-room doctor, Amin, sitting in a
doorway, talking on his cellphone. His right leg was missing at the knee, and
blood was spurting and pooling underneath him.
“It’s going to catch fire!” Amin shouted, seeing Faizullah. “We have to get
out.” Amin heaved himself onto his remaining leg and hopped through the
smoke-filled emergency room, and Faizullah followed him out, through the
entrance into the covered driveway, where Amin clutched the row of pillars that
lined it. “I can’t move,” he gasped, and so Faizullah slung him over his back
and staggered out onto the front lawn of the hospital, where they collapsed in
the grass.
/images/100000004410313/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html/images/100000004410313/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html
Human remains after the attack at the hospital.
Andrew Quilty
As they looked back at the hospital, another round of shells struck the
driveway where they had just been standing, partly collapsing its roof. The
hospital was on fire now, its flames leaping up and setting tall pine trees
alight. The lawn was lit with its dancing orange flame. From inside, Faizullah
could hear the screams of people burning alive.
Sixteen service members have been disciplined for their role in the airstrike,
but the military has declined to pursue criminal charges. The military has
argued that while both the Special Forces and the AC-130 crew made serious
errors, and in doing so violated the Geneva Conventions, they were not guilty
of crimes because they had not known they were targeting a hospital. “The label
‘war crimes’ is typically reserved for intentional acts — intentional targeting
of civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects or locations,” Gen.
Joseph Votel said. Hutchinson was relieved of command and reprimanded, but he
was recently assigned as his battalion’s executive officer, according to
Representative Hunter’s office.
It is true, as the report states, that there was a pileup of mistakes and
technical problems, without any one of which the strike might have been
averted. An antenna that would have allowed the gunship to send video of its
target to the Special Forces, and to receive an email sent by its headquarters
with the M.S.F. hospital’s coordinates, stopped working shortly after takeoff.
Later, the Special Forces headquarters at Bagram sent a Predator drone to
observe the wrong N.D.S. location on the other side of the city, and as a
result wasn’t watching the strike when it started.
Most important, because the strike was carried out under the special
self-defense-of-others designation given to the Afghan commandos, it didn’t
have to be approved by anyone besides Hutchinson and the aircraft commander.
Hutchinson, who was inside the police compound, claimed that he thought he saw
the K.K.A. convoy nearby and then heard them come under machine-gun fire. In
fact, the report states, the convoy was still five and a half miles away from
the target and had not yet been attacked. The investigators concluded that
Hutchinson violated the rules of engagement and stated that his “version of
events surrounding his decision to authorize the strike is internally
inconsistent, implausible and contradicted by other available sources of
credible information.”
But Hutchinson was arguably only doing what he was asked to do by his
higher-ups: fight with Afghan forces to retake the city of Kunduz as quickly
as possible. “If someone must be held accountable, let it not be the man who
was ordered to sky-dive without being given a parachute,” a Green Beret officer
in Kunduz — his name is redacted — said, complaining of “moral cowardice” and
an “abject failure of leadership.”
As a result of the self-defense justification, an airstrike against a building
— which would normally have gone all the way to General Campbell for approval —
could be approved on the spot. These safeguards around airstrikes (which
succeeded in reducing civilian casualties from airstrikes, to 204 in 2012 from
353 in 2011, according to United Nations figures) were intended not only to
prevent simple errors or collateral damage but also to avoid acting on bad
intelligence provided by Afghan sources, who had in the past been careless in
passing on unverified rumor as fact, or even seeking to maliciously use
American air power to target their rivals.
This, in turn, raises the question of what targeting information was provided
by the Afghan forces. The military has focused on the N.D.S. headquarters’
coordinates, which the gunship’s targeting system mistakenly indicated as an
open field. But those grids were passed to the Special Forces at 6 p.m., when
the Afghans informed them of their plan of attack for that night. When
Hutchinson asked them, seven hours later, after the confusion with the
gunship’s targeting system, about the compound to strike, they gave a
description of a “long T-shaped building” with a north-facing gate, which he
in turn passed to the gunship.
Maj. Gen. William Hickman, who led the military’s investigation, described this
as “an ambiguous physical description” that “appeared to match the M.S.F.
trauma center.” But it’s actually a rather specific description that
corresponds to M.S.F.’s distinctive layout. It does not at all resemble the
N.D.S. headquarters, which is a trapezoidal compound with a south-facing gate
and two main rectangular buildings facing each other across a cramped courtyard.
Indeed, according to the report, when the AC-130 returned to a normal altitude,
the sensor operator, worried that the navigation system had failed earlier,
tried punching in the original grid coordinates, and this time it aimed his
sensor at the N.D.S. headquarters. The crew members then did a “side-by-side
comparison” of the N.D.S. and M.S.F. sites using both of their sensors, but
based on Hutchinson’s description, they decided that they were 100 percent
confident that the T-shaped building was their target.
Hutchinson and the other Special Forces on the ground later told investigators
that the Afghans had a second target that night, in addition to the N.D.S.
headquarters. They all claimed not to know or recall what exactly it was.
“There was actually two targets they said they were going to hit, but they
didn’t even have a location for the other one, so we didn’t concern ourselves
much with it,” Hutchinson said. Another Green Beret said the Afghans had
provided two sets of coordinates, one for the N.D.S. headquarters and the
second for what was described as an insurgent command-and-control location,
but he didn’t know precisely what the other grid referred to. “I don’t recall
and don’t want to speculate,” said a third, who claimed to have passed both
grids to the aircraft. A member of the gunship crew also said they received
“multiple grids” that night.
Could the second target have been the hospital? Did Afghan forces, influenced
by their longstanding animosity for M.S.F., believe that it had become a
Taliban headquarters and needed to be taken out? Unless their findings have
been redacted, the military’s investigators seemed not to have probed these
questions.
When I interviewed them in November, none of the Afghan forces would claim
responsibility for passing on the description to the Special Forces. Yaftali,
the K.K.A. commander, said that the decision to strike the hospital was made by
the United States and that it was unfortunate but justified. “They were firing
R.P.G.s at us from the direction of the hospital,” he said.
“The Americans were aware that they were firing from there,” said Captain
Munib, an Afghan commando who was partnered with American forces in Kunduz. The
K.K.A. “had reported to them that the Taliban were there, and then they hit
it.” (Independent investigations have revealed no evidence to suggest that
armed Taliban fighters were inside the hospital or firing from nearby.)
In fairness, much like their American partners, the Afghan special forces sent
up from Kabul were reliant on information from local sources, who had
longstanding views about M.S.F.’s role in Kunduz. “That hospital is in the
service of the Taliban,” Gard said when I visited him in Kunduz. “I swear to
God, if they make it a hundred times, we’ll destroy it a hundred times.”
Is there still a place in today’s wars for a hospital to treat all sides? On
May 3, denouncing a pattern of attacks against medical facilities in conflict
zones, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2286, which
called for an end to impunity for those responsible. Oddly, some of the
individuals seated around the Security Council’s horseshoe-shaped table
represented countries involved in these strikes.
In Yemen, for example, the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and supported
with American and British intelligence and weaponry has repeatedly struck
medical facilities; it bombed an M.S.F. clinic on Oct. 26, despite having been
provided with its coordinates. In Syria, M.S.F. does not provide coordinates of
the medical facilities it supports to the Assad regime or the Russian forces
backing it, out of fear that the information will be used to target them. Aid
and human rights groups have accused both governments of deliberately attacking
medical facilities, including an M.S.F.-supported hospital in northern Syria
on Feb. 15, an accusation they have denied.
“Can we provide treatment to whoever you consider to be your enemy?” said
Jonathan Whittall, M.S.F.’s head of humanitarian analysis. “When you look at
the track record of the last few months, when four out of the five permanent
members of the Security Council have been involved in bombing M.S.F.
facilities, it’s a question that we urgently need to have answered.”
In Afghanistan, health facilities remain under threat, both by the Taliban —
who frequently commit war crimes like indiscriminately attacking civilians —
and by the Afghan government. According to the United Nations, on Feb. 18,
Afghan police commandos stormed into a clinic run by the Swedish Committee for
Afghanistan and executed two patients and a teenage caretaker who were
suspected of being insurgents. Jorgen Holmstrom, the S.C.A.’s country director,
told me that the commandos belonged to the 333 Battalion — the same unit that
raided the M.S.F. hospital last July and participated in the battle for Kunduz
— and were accompanied by British troops. (A spokesman for Resolute Support
stated that its investigation found “absolutely no evidence to support that
allegation” of executions and declined to comment on which units were present.)
In Kunduz, the hospital remains in ruins, and its staff has struggled to make
sense of what happened. Faizullah, the archivist, survived, but his young
friend Amin did not. “Whenever I went to sleep for two minutes, I was just
seeing the bombing and the killing and the dead bodies,” Faizullah said. Once
the airstrike ended, Esmat tried to suture Amin’s severed femoral artery on a
makeshift operating table, but to no avail. Madina, the little girl, lived
through Esmat’s operation but not the bombing. Her family found her two days
afterward and buried her with her big sister. “We tried to save her, but she
died,” Esmat said, picking his way through the rubble. “She died, and she
burned.” The walls around us still stood, but the roof was open to the gray
winter sky.
Editor’s note: The United States military initially declined to comment and
referred questions to the Afghan government, which also declined to comment.
After this article went to press, Peter Cook, the Pentagon’s spokesman, said in
a statement: “The comprehensive investigation that followed the Kunduz tragedy
determined that all members of both the ground force and the AC-130 aircrew
were unaware that the aircraft was firing on a medical facility throughout the
engagement. The investigation ultimately concluded that this tragic incident
was caused by a combination of human errors, compounded by process and
equipment failures.”
Matthieu Aikins is a Schell fellow at the Nation Institute and has been
reporting from Afghanistan since 2008. He has twice been a finalist for the
National Magazine Award and won a 2013 George Polk Award.
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