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Death from the Sky
Searching for Ground Truth in the Kunduz Hospital Bombing
✉
Photo: MSF/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
May Jeong
May Jeong
Apr. 28 2016, 2:31 p.m.
Photo: MSF/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
When the Taliban overran Kunduz last September after a monthlong siege, the
northern Afghan city became the first to fall to the insurgency since the war
began in 2001. A week earlier, many Kunduz residents had left town to observe
Eid al-Adha, the sacrificial feast honoring Abraham’s act of submission to God.
The heavy fighting sent the remaining Kunduzis fleeing as dead bodies littered
the streets.
On Friday, October 2, the city lay quiet, with just one building lit up against
the dark sky. Most other international organizations had evacuated when the
fighting began, but the Kunduz Trauma Center run by Médecins Sans Frontières
remained open throughout the battle for the city. It was one of the few
buildings with a generator. Throughout the week, violence seemed to lap against
the walls of the hospital without ever engulfing it. All around the
35,620-square-meter compound, the site of an old cotton factory, fighting ebbed
and flowed. Doctors and nurses marked the intensity of battle by the freshly
wounded who arrived at the gate. According to MSF, the hospital treated 376
emergency patients between September 28, when the city fell, and October 2.
The last week had seen much bloodshed, but Friday was uncharacteristically
calm: no fighting nearby, no gunshots, no explosions. “I remember seeing a
child flying a kite,” recalled Dr. Kathleen Thomas, “and thought to myself,
today is a calm day.” That evening, while more than 100 MSF employees and
caretakers slept in a basement below the hospital, several staff members
remained awake, preparing for what the night might bring. There were 105
patients in the hospital, including three or four Afghan government soldiers
and about 20 Taliban fighters, two of whom appeared to be of high rank.
Hospital staff stepped outside to take in the bracing autumn air, something
they’d lately refrained from doing for fear of stray bullets. The night sky was
open and clear.
Some 7,000 feet above, an AC-130 gunship was preparing to fire. At 2:08 a.m.,
on October 3, a missile began its descent, gliding through a cloudless sky.
A young patient waits to be X-rayed with her father at the Kunduz Trauma Center
run by Médecins Sans Frontières, May 20, 2015.
Photo: Andrew Quilty/Oculi
About two hours earlier, nurse Mohammad Poya lay down on the concrete floor of
the hospital’s administrative office. Poya had a few hours for sleep, but
instead dead bodies were on his mind. In the morning he had visited the morgue
to find its refrigerators full. Earlier in the week, Poya had asked the
orderlies to pack the dead in as tight as possible. When there was no more
space, he asked the cleaners to scrub the front porch of the morgue so that the
excess corpses could be stacked there. What Poya hated most was carelessness.
Many died undignified deaths in Afghanistan; the least the hospital could do
was to show the dead the respect that had eluded them in life.
Poya was especially worried about the fighting that had ensnarled the streets
around the compound. With all major roads blocked, the hospital was running low
on supplies. Corridors overflowed with the wounded, and a decision was made to
triage patients earlier than usual to avoid wasting resources on those least
likely to survive. The last thought Poya remembers having before finally
falling asleep was that they would have to start turning away patients.
Guilhem Molinie during a press conference at the MSF office in Kabul on Oct. 8,
2015.
Photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
Earlier that Friday, at 1 p.m., Guilhem Molinie, the head of MSF in
Afghanistan, sat at his desk in Kabul to write an email to a contact in the
U.S. 3rd Special Forces Group, which had been deployed to Kunduz after the fall
of the city. “Questions in case things go bad,” the subject line read. It
wasn’t the first time that week he had taken precautions. On Monday, when a
Taliban victory seemed certain, Molinie called an insurgent contact to reaffirm
the hospital’s neutral position. He did the same with the other side, sending a
letter with GPS coordinates of the hospital to the Afghan National Security
Council, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Ministry of Public Health, the U.S. Embassy, USAID, and the U.N.
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the agency’s body tasked
with responding to complex emergencies. The U.N. forwarded Molinie’s email to
Col. Paul Sarat, the deputy commander of NATO’s mission in the north, as well
as to Maj. Gen. Abdul Hamid, who headed the 209th Corps of the Afghan National
Army, which is responsible for the country’s northern nine provinces. Molinie
tried to reach out to Freedom’s Sentinel, the U.S. counterterrorism mission in
Afghanistan, but was not successful; he assumed he had done enough.
Andres Romero, MSF’s head liaison with the U.S. government, forwarded the
coordinates to Carter Malkasian, an old Afghan hand and an adviser to top U.S.
military officer Joseph Dunford of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Malkasian emailed
Romero to inquire whether the hospital had been overrun by the Taliban. Romero
told him no, but this information appeared not to have traveled back to the
special operations forces on the ground, since on Friday, according to the
Associated Press, a senior officer with the 3rd Special Forces Group wrote in
his daily report that the hospital was under Taliban control and that he
planned to clear the grounds in the coming days.
Among the units accompanying the 3rd Special Forces Group were Afghan commandos
and the 6th Special Operations Kandak, reporting to the Ministry of Defense;
222 and 333 national mission units, reporting to the Ministry of Interior; and
a police special unit already based out of Kunduz. The men had not worked
together before, and they were now in charge of leading the battle to take back
Kunduz city. “They just got thrown up there, into an environment they didn’t
know much about,” said a security analyst based in northern Afghanistan, who
was formerly an adviser to the U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan.
The security analyst asked not to be identified by name, as did many of the
dozens of individuals who were interviewed for this article in Afghanistan and
elsewhere. Some were not authorized to speak on the record; others, including
residents of Kunduz and Afghan security personnel, feared retaliation for doing
so.
The picture that emerges from these firsthand accounts, as well as from
interviews with several high-ranking Afghan officials, is one of remarkable
chaos and uncertainty, even by the standards of war. Those on the ground said
it was not clear who was in charge, and those in charge seemed not to have had
a clear understanding of what was happening on the ground at any given point
before, during, and after the fall of the city.
Afghan special forces prepare to launch an operation to retake the city of
Kunduz from Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2015.
Photo: Chine Nouvelle/Sipa/Newscom
At 10 p.m., Molinie returned to his office to speak with Heman Nagarathnam, who
was in charge of the hospital in Kunduz. It was a quiet night and Nagarathnam
stepped out for a cigarette to take the call. The nightly check-ins had allowed
Molinie to keep updated on the goings-on around the hospital. Molinie knew, for
instance, that on Tuesday a local Taliban representative visited Nagarathnam to
give his reassurance. He knew that the hospital lay in a Taliban-controlled
area, but that Afghan soldiers were still crossing the front line to bring in
patients. By Wednesday, however, worries of a Taliban takeover had pushed
soldiers to the provincial hospital, which was in an area controlled by
government forces.
At one point that week, government forces had regained the city’s central
square, before losing it again to the Taliban. On Friday night, Nagarathnam
relayed his concerns that the hospital was now located in an area vulnerable to
counterattack. They discussed the 2,000 sandbags that he had ordered to defend
the hospital against stray bullets. A little after 1:30 a.m., he went to bed.
For some time, Molinie told me, something had been bothering him. “It was never
clear who was in charge of what,” he said, in reference to the metastasizing
15-year-old conflict. The current war in Afghanistan was being run by two
distinct commands: NATO’s Operation Resolute Support (RS) and U.S.
Forces-Afghanistan’s Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Resolute Support was a
non-combat mission with a limited mandate to train, advise, and assist Afghan
security forces. Freedom’s Sentinel, successor to Operation Enduring Freedom,
was the latest version of America’s so-called war on terror. It was meant to
hunt down al Qaeda remnants, but without the rigor of public scrutiny,
Freedom’s Sentinel seemed to have spiraled beyond its already vague mandate.
President Barack Obama at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, Dec.
15, 2014.
Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images
Despite President Barack Obama’s 2014 announcement that America’s combat
mission in Afghanistan would end in 2015, Molinie had noticed that many
military operations seemed to be outside the bounds of both Resolute Support
and Freedom’s Sentinel. It was never clear where one mission ended and another
began. Long before January 2016, when President Obama expanded the
counterterrorism mission of Freedom’s Sentinel to include the fight against the
Islamic State, for instance, there were already airstrikes targeting ISIS in
the eastern province of Nangarhar.
When I asked Col. Michael Lawhorn, spokesperson for both NATO and U.S.
Forces-Afghanistan, to explain the differing missions of the two commands, he
said: “Think of it as a big box marked RS and inside that you have a small box
marked Freedom’s Sentinel but inside that box you have two smaller boxes marked
Resolute Support and another one marked counterterrorism.” When I inquired how
we might tell all these different boxes apart, Lawhorn conceded, “It’s not
always clear under what authority an action is taken.” The same was true, he
said, of what happened in Kunduz.
The destroyed operating room of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Oct.
10, 2015.
Photo: Andrew Quilty/Oculi
Back at the hospital, Poya had finally fallen asleep when he was suddenly
awakened by a terrible sound. Outside his window, the intensive care unit was
on fire. He looked up and saw that a plane — called a boongana by locals
because of the dull hum the plane emits — was orbiting the hospital. How to
describe the barrage that followed? Poya experienced the bombing as an
interminable terror, a series of deafening noises interrupted by terrifying
silence. Death felt certain, so he called his father to describe where the
family might find his remains. He saw a colleague, a 35-year-old pharmacist,
shot dead while trying to escape the compound through its south gate.
Belly of an AC-130 gunship.
Photo: Wikipedia
An AC-130 is a plane built around a gun. Its pylon turns allow for the
Gatling-style cannon to fire as many as 6,000 rounds per minute. It is the most
lethal air weapons platform: It flies longer, carries more weapons, and is
deadlier than any other aircraft. The same gunship was responsible for
capturing Kunduz from the Taliban and al Qaeda in the early days of the
U.S.-led NATO intervention in Afghanistan. Then, as now, up to 14 crew members
on the plane would have been assisted by a joint terminal attack coordinator on
the ground, who would have walked the crew through training the 105 mm howitzer
on the target to aim, then fire.
At 2:09 a.m. Molinie woke up to a phone call. Nagarathnam was on the line
telling him the hospital was on fire. Minutes later, another call informed him
that the hospital was being attacked from the air. Molinie called his Special
Forces contact at the J3 operations department who told him he didn’t know of
any airstrikes in the area. Molinie then called the U.N., whose contacts at
NATO said that RS was not aware of any operations either. Believing that it had
to be an Afghan military operation, Molinie contacted the deputy interior
minister and the operational commander with the Defense Ministry. Molinie
charted the sequence of events in a logbook. The last item, at 2:53 a.m.,
reads, “Plane still around. Just bombed again.”
By the time the attack was over, the intensive care unit, the emergency room,
and the operating theaters were burned to a husk. The corrugated tin roof had
peeled off, and only the walls remained standing, pockmarked with cannon fire.
The aircraft had fired 211 shells, killing 42 patients and staff who had
trusted in the hospital’s neutral and protected status. Patients had burned in
their beds. Six charred bodies awaited forensic investigation to determine
their identity; they had been burned beyond recognition.
The AC-130 had destroyed the main building of the MSF hospital, but all other
structures remained intact. The trajectory of the damage neatly matched the GPS
coordinates that Molinie had sent around just three days earlier. It was
evident that the Americans were involved, but in the early days, no one knew in
what capacity or to what end.
Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, stands
beside a map of the city of Kunduz as he addresses a press conference at
Resolute Support headquarters in Kabul on Nov. 25, 2015.
Photo: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images
From the beginning, the U.S. military struggled to keep its story straight.
Officials initially denied that U.S. forces had attacked the MSF hospital at
all, saying that the building might have sustained collateral damage from an
adjacent airstrike. Gen. John F. Campbell, the top American commander in
Afghanistan, stated that U.S. forces were taking fire when the airstrike was
called in. On October 4, Ash Carter, the secretary of defense, admitted that
“there was American air action in that area” and that “there was definitely
destruction in those structures and the hospital.” The narrative shifted the
next day when Gen. Campbell said Afghan forces had come under fire and called
in the airstrike.
MSF called for an independent investigation, denouncing the attack as a war
crime. After a six-week investigation, Gen. Campbell held a briefing in Kabul,
on the day before Thanksgiving, and presented what was now the official version
of the events: The attack was the result of a cascading series of human errors
and mechanical failures.
On September 30, 2015, he said, the Afghan forces and their U.S. advisers
established themselves at the provincial chief of police compound. The Afghan
forces planned a clearing operation and the U.S. forces agreed to have support
on standby.
According to Campbell, the aircrew believed they were coming to the rescue of
ground forces that were taking fire, a “troops in contact situation.” They
rushed to take off, skipping the pre-mission briefing.
Gen. Campbell said that the military had not followed its own rules of
engagement during the Kunduz airstrike.
Campbell said the crew was given a new mission after takeoff, an order to bomb
a local office of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan
government’s primary intelligence agency, that had been taken over by the
Taliban. “During the flight,” he said, “the electronic systems onboard the
aircraft malfunctioned, preventing the operation of an essential command and
control capability and eliminating the ability of aircraft to transmit video,
send and receive email, or send and receive electronic messages.” The crew
entered GPS coordinates for the NDS facility, but the electronic system brought
the plane to an empty field instead. From the empty field, they located the
“closest, largest building” that matched the commander’s description. The
internal NATO investigation found the aircrew did not observe hostile activity.
Gen. Campbell said that the military had not followed its own rules of
engagement during the Kunduz airstrike. The U.S. commander who called in the
strike did not have eyes on the target; he was several hundred meters away, in
the visual range of neither the NDS nor the MSF hospital. Nor was the strike
necessary for force protection.
In contrast to the U.S. military’s narrative, the Afghan government’s response
has been more consistent. Immediately following the attack, Afghan authorities
came out saying the strike was justified because the hospital was a Taliban
stronghold.
Hanif Atmar, then Afghanistan’s interior minister, speaks during a press
conference at the Ministry of Interior in Kabul on June 6, 2010.
Photo: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images
Maj. Abdul Kabir, an Afghan air liaison officer who helped coordinate airstrike
requests during the fighting in Kunduz, told me that no one had briefed
government forces on a mission specific no-strike list. A NATO official who
worked on the joint Afghan-NATO investigation said that the previous rules of
engagement did not include the no-strike list, but that the item had since been
added. Kabir and others said they had noted no difference in the rules of
engagement after the Kunduz strike.
Sediq Sediqi, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior, said that 10 to 15
terrorists were hiding in the hospital. National security adviser Hanif Atmar
said the government would take full responsibility, as “we are without doubt,
100 percent convinced the place was occupied by Taliban,” according to meeting
notes reviewed by the AP. Acting Defense Minister Masoom Stanekzai also told AP
that the hospital was used as shelter for insurgents.
MSF has repeatedly denied that armed Taliban fighters were present in the
hospital, and no one has presented any credible evidence to support accusations
to the contrary.
In his November briefing, Gen. Campbell said that the “individuals most closely
associated with the incident have been suspended from their duty positions,”
pending disciplinary measures. Yet the U.S. has steadfastly refused to
countenance an independent investigation, which has led to suspicions of a
cover-up. “Had the authorities said it is a terrible mistake from day one, then
it would have been easier to believe that it was a mistake,” MSF’s Molinie told
me. “But because in the beginning Afghan senior officials said the hospital was
bombed because it was a Taliban base, it is difficult for us to swallow the 100
percent mistake scenario.”
Taliban fighters hug each other a day after they overran the strategic northern
city of Kunduz, Sept. 29, 2015.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
Gen. Campbell had just landed in Washington, D.C., when he heard the news from
Kunduz. The fall of the city had apparently come as a surprise to everyone,
including the Taliban. One exception was the governor of Kunduz, Omar Safi, who
spent most of his short 10-month tenure sounding desperate alarm at the
imminent fall of the city.
Safi told me he wrote 35 letters to the U.S. National Security Council, even
breaching protocol and emailing Gen. John Campbell directly for air support.
Campbell told Safi that the new mandate did not allow for close air support for
Afghan forces. Even so, before departing for Washington, in an effort to
decentralize command within forces, Campbell had deputized strike authority to
a subordinate, a tactical level commander who would make decisions in the pitch
of battle.
The city had been on the verge of collapse all through 2015, but had always
managed to remain under government control. It nearly fell in April, when the
Taliban began another bid for the city. Then came another scare in June, when
the northeastern districts fell to the Taliban while the center held. By the
fall, said the security analyst based in northern Afghanistan, “It was the
third time everyone had seen that movie.”
“I don’t think anyone had any clue about what was going on on the ground,” said
the security analyst, who monitored the fall of Kunduz closely. He remembers
calling up the political adviser to Gen. Campbell to inform him that the city
was about to fall. “I sent him a text saying the U.N. office had been overrun
and that it was on fire. He wrote back, ‘We just checked and it’s only a couple
of the outlying buildings that are on fire.’ If someone had said that about RS
HQ, ‘No, it’s not the HQ. It’s just the PX that’s on fire,’ I don’t think it
would have gone over so well.”
“Don’t forget intelligence is about information and misinformation.”
According to Brig. Gen. Ashraf Khan, Afghan air ops commander for the north,
less than 24 hours after Kunduz fell, Gen. Campbell authorized the use of
AC-130s by ground commanders.
In a telephone interview, Gen. Campbell said that he would not comment on rules
of engagement, but said, “If somebody was under attack and they needed to use
the AC-130, why would they have to wait until I landed to ask for permission to
do that? You know what I’m saying? You always have the right to self-defense.
I’m not talking Kunduz — I’m talking any time.”
“If they have to call their boss, who have to call their boss, who have to call
their boss, who have to call their boss, who have to call their boss, who has
to call me who’s on an airplane, by that time, the guys on the ground are dead.”
“There is always going to be somebody in charge,” Campbell said. “When you have
changes in leadership, you lay out who has the authority to do what, in all
cases.” He said that he had visited the site of a C-130 crash before he left
Afghanistan, and then as soon as he landed in Washington, he found out about
the Kunduz strike. “The initial reports said we had hit a hospital, and I know
we don’t target hospitals so something had to go wrong.”
In an ordinary scenario, an Afghan force on the ground requests an airstrike
through its chain of command at the Ministry of Defense, which in turn contacts
NATO. A request requires an eight-line form including the grid location, threat
level, and other details such as geographical or biographical information
submitted via email, and takes two to three days for approval, according to
flight coordinators. But in the heat of combat, strikes can be requested via an
unencrypted mobile phone and may be approved in less than 20 minutes, according
to an RS flight coordinator who spoke to The Intercept.
A former Afghan NDS official said that the initial raw report about insurgents
being in the MSF hospital was corroborated with signals intelligence — phone or
radio communications that were tracked back to the compound. These two streams
of information, he said, along with eyewitness accounts, elevated the
information into “finished intel,” indicating that the Taliban were inside the
hospital. Yet according to a former Afghan government adviser, the aftermath of
the hospital strike was marked by uncertainty. “Don’t forget intelligence is
about information and misinformation.”
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani during a press conference at the presidential
palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Oct. 1, 2015.
Photo: Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
According to the former government adviser, in the days following the hospital
strike, the Afghans were under immense pressure from the U.S. military to stay
in line. President Ashraf Ghani, who issued a statement expressing his “deep
sorrow,” was sympathetic to MSF’s call for an independent fact-finding mission,
but when the U.S. refused to participate, the Afghans were “put in a position
of saying no.”
“The Americans put their foot down and said that’s not going to happen,” the
former adviser said. “[They] made it very clear that that could result in a
loss of support.” The threat of possible war crimes charges loomed over the
discussion.
In the absence of an independent investigation, a joint Afghan-NATO Combined
Civilian Casualty Assessment Team was deployed to Kunduz. President Ghani also
assigned an Afghan-led commission overseen by former NDS head Amrullah Saleh,
which ended up excluding the hospital strike from its investigation.
The MSF bombing brought to the surface the underlying tensions within the
coalition government, led by President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah
Abdullah. Discord between the two men had resulted in a standoff, which their
political rivals cited as the reason for the fall of Kunduz. Indeed, the defeat
came on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the national unity government,
which according to its detractors had achieved nothing. Even amid deteriorating
security, due to the persistent animus between the two leaders, Afghanistan did
not yet have a permanent defense minister.
More than 20 Afghan government officials and members of security forces
interviewed for this article held as an unassailable belief that the Taliban
had attacked Afghan forces from inside the hospital. That deeply held
conviction remained resolute even in the face of mounting counterevidence.
“[The fall of] Kunduz was a considerable loss of face for the government,” the
former government adviser told me. National security adviser Hanif Atmar was
“belligerent,” he said, on the issue of Kunduz. “He is a very thoughtful and
intelligent person. He wouldn’t jump to conclusions. But in this case, it
didn’t seem like he wanted to find the truth.”
“It was a very emotional time for everybody,” the former government adviser
said. “It was a huge loss of prestige. Morale was zero.”
In this strategic and emotional nadir, according to Mark Bowden, the United
Nations deputy special representative for Afghanistan, there arose a feeling
that “things previously not legitimate became more legitimate.” The general
sense among the Afghan forces was that the war was going nowhere good. In a
losing battle, all becomes fair, including the bombing of a hospital that many
had come to believe was harboring insurgents.
A police officer stands guard in front of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital
destroyed by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Oct. 11, 2015.
Photo: Omid/Xinhua/Newscom
On the night of the hospital strike, a unit commander with the Ministry of
Defense special forces was at the police headquarters taking fire from the
direction of the hospital. “Vehicles were coming out of there, engaging, then
retreating,” he told me. When I pointed out that he couldn’t have seen the gate
of the hospital from where he was, several hundred meters away, he said that he
was sure because he had personally interrogated a cleaner who told him that the
hospital was full of “armed men using it as a cover.” The cleaner told the
commander that there were Pakistani generals using the hospital as a
recollection point and that they had set up a war room there. When I challenged
his line of vision again, he responded, “Anyone can claim anything. The truth
is different.”
Saleh, the author of the 200-page Afghan commission report on the fall of
Kunduz and head of one of the many informal political coalitions opposing the
current government, believed that the “hospital sanctity had been violated” and
held out as evidence 130 hours of recorded conversations with more than 600
interlocutors. “I spoke with the MSF country director,” Saleh told me recently.
“They don’t deny that the hospital was infiltrated by the Taliban.”
MSF has consistently denied that armed fighters were present in the hospital.
Saleh claimed that Afghan forces had been taking fire from the southeastern
wall of the hospital, used as a shield by the insurgents. Ismail Masood, chief
of staff to the governor of Kunduz, who sat in on meetings with the NDS and
other intelligence agencies, said he had also heard that “it was in the parking
area to the east where the Taliban were present.”
Neighbors, however, remembered something different. Abdul Wahab, a gatekeeper
working across the street from the hospital, told me that the Taliban regularly
brought their injured to the trauma center, but that he never saw any armed
insurgents enter it, nor did he recall seeing any weapons fire coming from the
hospital. Abdul Maroof, whose warehouse shares its north wall with the
hospital, said he saw “as many as a hundred” Taliban fighters entering the NDS
office across the street, but never the hospital.
MSF, for its part, stated that on the day of the strike, “No fighting was
taking place around the hospital, no planes were heard overhead, no gunshots
were reported, nor explosions in the vicinity of the hospital.”
“I have all my sympathies with the victims,” Saleh said. “But it doesn’t serve
the purpose of the survivor to say, yes, there was fighting. They have to show
themselves as victims, which they are anyway.” Saleh said the hospital was
“part of the tragedy but not the whole tragedy.” In a war that has seen a box
of propaganda leaflets dropped from a plane crush a 5-year-old girl to death,
and wedding parties assaulted by aircraft, a hospital bombing did not appear to
him to be out of the ordinary.
“Have you tasted fear?” Kabir asked. Before I could answer, he pulled out a
pistol. “When I put this pistol to your head, do you feel afraid?”
A former Afghan special forces captain was indignant at what he considered
unwarranted media coverage of the hospital strike. “This is going to limit
airstrikes,” he told me. “And without airstrikes, we would have lost Kunduz. We
need the Americans to stand with us,” he said. “Stories like these are going to
hurt innocent people. When Daesh take over Afghanistan, the first person to be
raped or killed will be you, the foreigner.”
“Afghans have little consideration for the Geneva Conventions,” a former senior
Western official told me. “Their main concern is continuing to have U.S.
backing and aerial support. Their biggest fear after the strike was that this
would put a chill on their being able to request U.S. air support when shit
hits the fan.”
Maj. Abdul Kabir, the air liaison officer, wanted me to understand how
difficult war can be. “Will you let your men get killed because of a silly
rule? Are you saying fighting is easy?” I said that I had never been in such a
situation but could imagine the challenge. “From one side, you have the Taliban
attacking you, and from another side, you have your soldiers saying they are
just meters away. And then we have these international rules that make it
difficult to fight the enemy.”
“Have you tasted fear?” Kabir asked. Before I could answer, he pulled out a
pistol. We were sitting in a hotel room in Mazar-e-Sharif, waiting to board a
helicopter to Kunduz. “When I put this pistol to your head, do you feel
afraid?” I told him that I understood the point he was making. “In war, you
don’t feel too kind for your enemy. You don’t show kindness because you want to
kill him so that you can save your own life.”
Others who could not fully imagine the American military’s capacity for failure
simply subscribed to ex post facto reasoning. “They cannot believe this is a
mistake, and so they work backwards,” Molinie said. They clung to “an
ideological vision of facts” and “saw things through the prism of their own
beliefs.”
Afghan security forces walk past a Taliban fighter’s dead body after retaking
Kunduz from the Taliban, Oct. 4, 2015.
Photo: Jawed Dehsabzi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Lt. Abdullah Gard, who heads the Ministry of Interior’s Quick Reaction Force,
said he had been unhappy about the hospital ever since the MSF opened a clinic
in Chardara district, a Taliban stronghold. MSF had noticed that the patients
were experiencing delays that resulted in loss of limb, or life, and so last
June, the group opened the stabilization post on the other side of the front
line. To Gard and his men, that sealed the fate of the hospital. In the eyes of
the besieged Afghan military fighting a losing war, MSF had veered too far to
the other side. In the binaries that dictate the conflict, in which only two
positions are made possible, being a neutral player was an untenable position.
War makes monsters of the other; those who do not stand with us become those
who stand against us. “They are seen as belligerents in the fight rather than
an impartial group,” the security analyst based in northern Afghanistan told
me. “In the government’s eyes, Chardara went too far.”
Gard spoke of MSF with the personal hatred reserved for the truly perfidious.
He accused the group of “patching up fighters and sending them back out,” a
line I heard repeatedly. Cmdr. Abdul Wahab, head of the unit that guarded the
provincial chief of police compound, told me he could not understand why in
battle an insurgent could be killed, but the minute he was injured, he would be
taken to a hospital and given protective status. Wouldn’t it be easier, he
asked, wouldn’t the war be less protracted or bloody if they were allowed to
march in and take men when they were most compromised? He had visited the MSF
hospital three times to complain. Each time a foreign doctor explained the
hospital’s neutral status and its no-weapons policy, which mystified him.
The destroyed Médecins Sans Frontières hospital after a U.S. airstrike in
Kunduz, Afghanistan, Oct. 11, 2015.
Photo: Omid/Xinhua/Newscom
The Kunduz attack was neither the first nor the last attack on a hospital run
by an international organization. On February 17, a Swedish-run clinic in
Wardak province was raided by the Afghan special forces. The troops barged into
the 10-bed clinic as helicopters circled above. Accompanying them were
English-speaking mentors who did not participate in the raid but were in the
vicinity when the Afghan forces grabbed two patients and a caretaker who
appeared to be underage, and dragged them to an abandoned shop. Twenty minutes
later, gunshots rang out. Later, all three were found executed. Officials from
Resolute Support informed the Swedish Committee that an investigation had been
opened.
This was at least the eighth time a medical facility supported by the Swedish
Committee had been raided or searched by international forces in four years.
Nearly all of the clinics the group operates are in Taliban-controlled or
contested territories, where need is greatest. One particular raid in 2009 in a
Swedish Committee-run clinic in Wardak came days after a NATO airstrike had
killed as many as 125 near Kunduz. In 2009, as in 2016, the airstrike inspired
outcry from international observers, but that raid, also a possible violation
of international law, did not garner much attention.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, between 2014 and
2015 there was a 50 percent increase in the number of threats or attacks on
medical facilities in Afghanistan that were reported to the organization.
Unlike the headline-grabbing Kunduz strike, many of these small slights and
violations go unnoticed, even as they chip away at something much more
integral. “There are clearly strong feelings within government [that] the
Taliban are legitimate targets wherever they are,” the U.N.’s Mark Bowden told
me.
After the Kunduz strike, Emergency, an international NGO, built a 40-foot
bunker beneath its trauma center in Helmand.
A patient — later identified as 43-year-old Baynazar Mohammad Nazar, a husband
and father of four — lies dead on an operating table inside the MSF Kunduz
Trauma Center, Oct. 10, 2015.
Photo: Andrew Quilty/Oculi
On March 2, Gen. Campbell left his position without a promotion, raising
suspicion that his involvement, or at least his culpability, in the Kunduz
strike may be much larger than has been publicly revealed. He will retire on
May 1. Campbell had been rumored to be next in line to head U.S. Central
Command, the “heir apparent.” But the MSF incident appeared to have “played a
role in Campbell being put out to pasture,” a former Western official said.
Asked about being passed over for the Central Command position, Gen. Campbell
replied, “It’s not that people sit and think, ah shoot, I want to be the next
CENTCOM commander. I didn’t do that. We do whatever job we are assigned.” His
retirement, however, resulted from being offered a job he didn’t care to take.
“I mean, there are all sorts of rumors. I don’t know what goes on there, but
the secretary called me up and asked me to take up another command position. I
was very honored and thanked him for his trust and confidence, and to the
president as well, but for me at this point in time, it is not something I want
to do so I respectfully declined. That’s all.”
Campbell reiterated his November statements about the Pentagon’s investigation,
which may be released in redacted form tomorrow. About the initial claims of
collateral damage, he responded, “I would not authorize anybody to say
collateral damage. That’s stupid. All it does is upset people.”
“I don’t think the story changed,” he said. “I think we learned from the
investigation more and more. We just couldn’t talk about it until the
investigation was finished. Once the investigation was finished, then you have
to let all the disciplinary action play out.”
On March 16, U.S. defense officials indicated that more than a dozen
ground-level U.S. military personnel had been disciplined for misconduct
leading to the strike.
Deliberately targeting a hospital is a war crime, after all, but so is the
indiscriminate killing of civilians outside a hospital. And it’s worth noting,
according to a Western security analyst who is an expert on Kunduz, that “even
if they had struck the NDS headquarters, there still would have been civilian
casualties.” The NDS office, which the U.S. military has said was the intended
target, stands in a residential neighborhood, as do the private home and the
tea factory that were also bombed on the night of the MSF hospital strike. An
AC-130, the analyst pointed out, is a disproportionate and indiscriminate
weapon, not appropriate for use in civilian areas in the dead of night.
A former Afghan special forces commander who was at the command and control
center in Kunduz during the fight assured me I would never get to the bottom of
the attack. The reason why I couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened, he
said, was the fog of war. “Ground truth is impossible to know. Even those who
were there wouldn’t be able to tell you what they saw.” Not the MSF internal
investigation, not the joint Afghan-NATO inquiry, not the Saleh commission, and
certainly not the 5,000-page military investigation by U.S. Central Command
would tell us what happened that night, he assured me. “Have you ever been in a
fire fight? It passes like a dream.” The final sentence of the Saleh report
echoed his sentiment. “Facts are never solid and we cannot feel them and they
will remain this way.”
What is solid, however, are the 211 shells that were fired at a hospital in
northern Afghanistan one night last October, and that those shells were felt by
the 42 men, women, and children who were killed, and that they will remain that
way, victims of incompetence or prejudice or both. Ground truth may be elusive,
but it exists; someone along the military chain of command gave an order, which
directly resulted in the loss of innocent lives.
Contact the author:
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Death from the Sky
Searching for Ground Truth in the Kunduz Hospital Bombing
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Photo: MSF/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
/staff/may-jeong//staff/may-jeong/
/staff/may-jeong//staff/may-jeong/
May Jeong
Apr. 28 2016, 2:31 p.m.
When the Taliban overran Kunduz last September after a monthlong siege, the
northern Afghan city became the first to fall to the insurgency since the war
began in 2001. A week earlier, many Kunduz residents had left town to observe
Eid al-Adha, the sacrificial feast honoring Abraham’s act of submission to God.
The heavy fighting sent the remaining Kunduzis fleeing as dead bodies littered
the streets.
On Friday, October 2, the city lay quiet, with just one building lit up against
the dark sky. Most other international organizations had evacuated when the
fighting began, but the Kunduz Trauma Center run by Médecins Sans Frontières
remained open throughout the battle for the city. It was one of the few
buildings with a generator. Throughout the week, violence seemed to lap against
the walls of the hospital without ever engulfing it. All around the
35,620-square-meter compound, the site of an old cotton factory, fighting ebbed
and flowed. Doctors and nurses marked the intensity of battle by the freshly
wounded who arrived at the gate. According to MSF, the hospital treated 376
emergency patients between September 28, when the city fell, and October 2.
The last week had seen much bloodshed, but Friday was uncharacteristically
calm: no fighting nearby, no gunshots, no explosions. “I remember seeing a
child flying a kite,” recalled Dr. Kathleen Thomas, “and thought to myself,
today is a calm day.” That evening, while more than 100 MSF employees and
caretakers slept in a basement below the hospital, several staff members
remained awake, preparing for what the night might bring. There were 105
patients in the hospital, including three or four Afghan government soldiers
and about 20 Taliban fighters, two of whom appeared to be of high rank.
Hospital staff stepped outside to take in the bracing autumn air, something
they’d lately refrained from doing for fear of stray bullets. The night sky was
open and clear.
Some 7,000 feet above, an AC-130 gunship was preparing to fire. At 2:08 a.m.,
on October 3, a missile began its descent, gliding through a cloudless sky.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/kunduz-hospital-before.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/kunduz-hospital-before.jpg
A young patient waits to be X-rayed with her father at the Kunduz Trauma Center
run by Médecins Sans Frontières, May 20, 2015.
Photo: Andrew Quilty/Oculi
About two hours earlier, nurse Mohammad Poya lay down on the concrete floor of
the hospital’s administrative office. Poya had a few hours for sleep, but
instead dead bodies were on his mind. In the morning he had visited the morgue
to find its refrigerators full. Earlier in the week, Poya had asked the
orderlies to pack the dead in as tight as possible. When there was no more
space, he asked the cleaners to scrub the front porch of the morgue so that the
excess corpses could be stacked there. What Poya hated most was carelessness.
Many died undignified deaths in Afghanistan; the least the hospital could do
was to show the dead the respect that had eluded them in life.
Poya was especially worried about the fighting that had ensnarled the streets
around the compound. With all major roads blocked, the hospital was running low
on supplies. Corridors overflowed with the wounded, and a decision was made to
triage patients earlier than usual to avoid wasting resources on those least
likely to survive. The last thought Poya remembers having before finally
falling asleep was that they would have to start turning away patients.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/Guilhem-Molinie1.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/Guilhem-Molinie1.jpg
Guilhem Molinie during a press conference at the MSF office in Kabul on Oct. 8,
2015.
Photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images
Earlier that Friday, at 1 p.m., Guilhem Molinie, the head of MSF in
Afghanistan, sat at his desk in Kabul to write an email to a contact in the
U.S. 3rd Special Forces Group, which had been deployed to Kunduz after the fall
of the city. “Questions in case things go bad,” the subject line read. It
wasn’t the first time that week he had taken precautions. On Monday, when a
Taliban victory seemed certain, Molinie called an insurgent contact to reaffirm
the hospital’s neutral position. He did the same with the other side, sending a
letter with GPS coordinates of the hospital to the Afghan National Security
Council, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Ministry of Public Health, the U.S. Embassy, USAID, and the U.N.
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the agency’s body tasked
with responding to complex emergencies. The U.N. forwarded Molinie’s email to
Col. Paul Sarat, the deputy commander of NATO’s mission in the north, as well
as to Maj. Gen. Abdul Hamid, who headed the 209th Corps of the Afghan National
Army, which is responsible for the country’s northern nine provinces. Molinie
tried to reach out to Freedom’s Sentinel, the U.S. counterterrorism mission in
Afghanistan, but was not successful; he assumed he had done enough.
Andres Romero, MSF’s head liaison with the U.S. government, forwarded the
coordinates to Carter Malkasian, an old Afghan hand and an adviser to top U.S.
military officer Joseph Dunford of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Malkasian emailed
Romero to inquire whether the hospital had been overrun by the Taliban. Romero
told him no, but this information appeared not to have traveled back to the
special operations forces on the ground, since on Friday, according to the
Associated Press, a senior officer with the 3rd Special Forces Group wrote in
his daily report that the hospital was under Taliban control and that he
planned to clear the grounds in the coming days.
Among the units accompanying the 3rd Special Forces Group were Afghan commandos
and the 6th Special Operations Kandak, reporting to the Ministry of Defense;
222 and 333 national mission units, reporting to the Ministry of Interior; and
a police special unit already based out of Kunduz. The men had not worked
together before, and they were now in charge of leading the battle to take back
Kunduz city. “They just got thrown up there, into an environment they didn’t
know much about,” said a security analyst based in northern Afghanistan, who
was formerly an adviser to the U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan.
The security analyst asked not to be identified by name, as did many of the
dozens of individuals who were interviewed for this article in Afghanistan and
elsewhere. Some were not authorized to speak on the record; others, including
residents of Kunduz and Afghan security personnel, feared retaliation for doing
so.
The picture that emerges from these firsthand accounts, as well as from
interviews with several high-ranking Afghan officials, is one of remarkable
chaos and uncertainty, even by the standards of war. Those on the ground said
it was not clear who was in charge, and those in charge seemed not to have had
a clear understanding of what was happening on the ground at any given point
before, during, and after the fall of the city.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/afghan-special-forces.jpgAfghan
security forces launched counter-offensive on Tuesday morning to retake the
northern Kunduz city and expel Taliban militants from the area, Kunduz police
spokesman Sayed Sarwar Hussaini said. (Xinhua/Najim Rahim)
/CHINENOUVELLE_2909.AFG.003/Credit:CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/1509291919 (Newscom
TagID: sfphotos823730.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]"
src="https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/afghan-special-forces-1000x592.jpg"https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/afghan-special-forces.jpg
Afghan special forces prepare to launch an operation to retake the city of
Kunduz from Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2015.
Photo: Chine Nouvelle/Sipa/Newscom
At 10 p.m., Molinie returned to his office to speak with Heman Nagarathnam, who
was in charge of the hospital in Kunduz. It was a quiet night and Nagarathnam
stepped out for a cigarette to take the call. The nightly check-ins had allowed
Molinie to keep updated on the goings-on around the hospital. Molinie knew, for
instance, that on Tuesday a local Taliban representative visited Nagarathnam to
give his reassurance. He knew that the hospital lay in a Taliban-controlled
area, but that Afghan soldiers were still crossing the front line to bring in
patients. By Wednesday, however, worries of a Taliban takeover had pushed
soldiers to the provincial hospital, which was in an area controlled by
government forces.
At one point that week, government forces had regained the city’s central
square, before losing it again to the Taliban. On Friday night, Nagarathnam
relayed his concerns that the hospital was now located in an area vulnerable to
counterattack. They discussed the 2,000 sandbags that he had ordered to defend
the hospital against stray bullets. A little after 1:30 a.m., he went to bed.
For some time, Molinie told me, something had been bothering him. “It was never
clear who was in charge of what,” he said, in reference to the metastasizing
15-year-old conflict. The current war in Afghanistan was being run by two
distinct commands: NATO’s Operation Resolute Support (RS) and U.S.
Forces-Afghanistan’s Operation Freedom’s Sentinel. Resolute Support was a
non-combat mission with a limited mandate to train, advise, and assist Afghan
security forces. Freedom’s Sentinel, successor to Operation Enduring Freedom,
was the latest version of America’s so-called war on terror. It was meant to
hunt down al Qaeda remnants, but without the rigor of public scrutiny,
Freedom’s Sentinel seemed to have spiraled beyond its already vague mandate.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/GettyImages-460504398.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/GettyImages-460504398.jpg
President Barack Obama at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, Dec.
15, 2014.
Photo: Mark Makela/Getty Images
Despite President Barack Obama’s 2014 announcement that America’s combat
mission in Afghanistan would end in 2015, Molinie had noticed that many
military operations seemed to be outside the bounds of both Resolute Support
and Freedom’s Sentinel. It was never clear where one mission ended and another
began. Long before January 2016, when President Obama expanded the
counterterrorism mission of Freedom’s Sentinel to include the fight against the
Islamic State, for instance, there were already airstrikes targeting ISIS in
the eastern province of Nangarhar.
When I asked Col. Michael Lawhorn, spokesperson for both NATO and U.S.
Forces-Afghanistan, to explain the differing missions of the two commands, he
said: “Think of it as a big box marked RS and inside that you have a small box
marked Freedom’s Sentinel but inside that box you have two smaller boxes marked
Resolute Support and another one marked counterterrorism.” When I inquired how
we might tell all these different boxes apart, Lawhorn conceded, “It’s not
always clear under what authority an action is taken.” The same was true, he
said, of what happened in Kunduz.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/kunduz-hospital-andrew-quilty.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/kunduz-hospital-andrew-quilty.jpg
The destroyed operating room of the MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Oct.
10, 2015.
Photo: Andrew Quilty/Oculi
Back at the hospital, Poya had finally fallen asleep when he was suddenly
awakened by a terrible sound. Outside his window, the intensive care unit was
on fire. He looked up and saw that a plane — called a boongana by locals
because of the dull hum the plane emits — was orbiting the hospital. How to
describe the barrage that followed? Poya experienced the bombing as an
interminable terror, a series of deafening noises interrupted by terrifying
silence. Death felt certain, so he called his father to describe where the
family might find his remains. He saw a colleague, a 35-year-old pharmacist,
shot dead while trying to escape the compound through its south gate.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/AC-130-belly.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/AC-130-belly.jpg
Belly of an AC-130 gunship.
Photo: Wikipedia
An AC-130 is a plane built around a gun. Its pylon turns allow for the
Gatling-style cannon to fire as many as 6,000 rounds per minute. It is the most
lethal air weapons platform: It flies longer, carries more weapons, and is
deadlier than any other aircraft. The same gunship was responsible for
capturing Kunduz from the Taliban and al Qaeda in the early days of the
U.S.-led NATO intervention in Afghanistan. Then, as now, up to 14 crew members
on the plane would have been assisted by a joint terminal attack coordinator on
the ground, who would have walked the crew through training the 105 mm howitzer
on the target to aim, then fire.
At 2:09 a.m. Molinie woke up to a phone call. Nagarathnam was on the line
telling him the hospital was on fire. Minutes later, another call informed him
that the hospital was being attacked from the air. Molinie called his Special
Forces contact at the J3 operations department who told him he didn’t know of
any airstrikes in the area. Molinie then called the U.N., whose contacts at
NATO said that RS was not aware of any operations either. Believing that it had
to be an Afghan military operation, Molinie contacted the deputy interior
minister and the operational commander with the Defense Ministry. Molinie
charted the sequence of events in a logbook. The last item, at 2:53 a.m.,
reads, “Plane still around. Just bombed again.”
By the time the attack was over, the intensive care unit, the emergency room,
and the operating theaters were burned to a husk. The corrugated tin roof had
peeled off, and only the walls remained standing, pockmarked with cannon fire.
The aircraft had fired 211 shells, killing 42 patients and staff who had
trusted in the hospital’s neutral and protected status. Patients had burned in
their beds. Six charred bodies awaited forensic investigation to determine
their identity; they had been burned beyond recognition.
The AC-130 had destroyed the main building of the MSF hospital, but all other
structures remained intact. The trajectory of the damage neatly matched the GPS
coordinates that Molinie had sent around just three days earlier. It was
evident that the Americans were involved, but in the early days, no one knew in
what capacity or to what end.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/john-campbell.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/john-campbell.jpg
Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, stands
beside a map of the city of Kunduz as he addresses a press conference at
Resolute Support headquarters in Kabul on Nov. 25, 2015.
Photo: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images
From the beginning, the U.S. military struggled to keep its story straight.
Officials initially denied that U.S. forces had attacked the MSF hospital at
all, saying that the building might have sustained collateral damage from an
adjacent airstrike. Gen. John F. Campbell, the top American commander in
Afghanistan, stated that U.S. forces were taking fire when the airstrike was
called in. On October 4, Ash Carter, the secretary of defense, admitted that
“there was American air action in that area” and that “there was definitely
destruction in those structures and the hospital.” The narrative shifted the
next day when Gen. Campbell said Afghan forces had come under fire and called
in the airstrike.
MSF called for an independent investigation, denouncing the attack as a war
crime. After a six-week investigation, Gen. Campbell held a briefing in Kabul,
on the day before Thanksgiving, and presented what was now the official version
of the events: The attack was the result of a cascading series of human errors
and mechanical failures.
On September 30, 2015, he said, the Afghan forces and their U.S. advisers
established themselves at the provincial chief of police compound. The Afghan
forces planned a clearing operation and the U.S. forces agreed to have support
on standby.
According to Campbell, the aircrew believed they were coming to the rescue of
ground forces that were taking fire, a “troops in contact situation.” They
rushed to take off, skipping the pre-mission briefing.
Gen. Campbell said that the military had not followed its own rules of
engagement during the Kunduz airstrike.
Campbell said the crew was given a new mission after takeoff, an order to bomb
a local office of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan
government’s primary intelligence agency, that had been taken over by the
Taliban. “During the flight,” he said, “the electronic systems onboard the
aircraft malfunctioned, preventing the operation of an essential command and
control capability and eliminating the ability of aircraft to transmit video,
send and receive email, or send and receive electronic messages.” The crew
entered GPS coordinates for the NDS facility, but the electronic system brought
the plane to an empty field instead. From the empty field, they located the
“closest, largest building” that matched the commander’s description. The
internal NATO investigation found the aircrew did not observe hostile activity.
Gen. Campbell said that the military had not followed its own rules of
engagement during the Kunduz airstrike. The U.S. commander who called in the
strike did not have eyes on the target; he was several hundred meters away, in
the visual range of neither the NDS nor the MSF hospital. Nor was the strike
necessary for force protection.
In contrast to the U.S. military’s narrative, the Afghan government’s response
has been more consistent. Immediately following the attack, Afghan authorities
came out saying the strike was justified because the hospital was a Taliban
stronghold.
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/GettyImages-101661715.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/GettyImages-101661715.jpg
Hanif Atmar, then Afghanistan’s interior minister, speaks during a press
conference at the Ministry of Interior in Kabul on June 6, 2010.
Photo: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images
Maj. Abdul Kabir, an Afghan air liaison officer who helped coordinate airstrike
requests during the fighting in Kunduz, told me that no one had briefed
government forces on a mission specific no-strike list. A NATO official who
worked on the joint Afghan-NATO investigation said that the previous rules of
engagement did not include the no-strike list, but that the item had since been
added. Kabir and others said they had noted no difference in the rules of
engagement after the Kunduz strike.
Sediq Sediqi, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior, said that 10 to 15
terrorists were hiding in the hospital. National security adviser Hanif Atmar
said the government would take full responsibility, as “we are without doubt,
100 percent convinced the place was occupied by Taliban,” according to meeting
notes reviewed by the AP. Acting Defense Minister Masoom Stanekzai also told AP
that the hospital was used as shelter for insurgents.
MSF has repeatedly denied that armed Taliban fighters were present in the
hospital, and no one has presented any credible evidence to support accusations
to the contrary.
In his November briefing, Gen. Campbell said that the “individuals most closely
associated with the incident have been suspended from their duty positions,”
pending disciplinary measures. Yet the U.S. has steadfastly refused to
countenance an independent investigation, which has led to suspicions of a
cover-up. “Had the authorities said it is a terrible mistake from day one, then
it would have been easier to believe that it was a mistake,” MSF’s Molinie told
me. “But because in the beginning Afghan senior officials said the hospital was
bombed because it was a Taliban base, it is difficult for us to swallow the 100
percent mistake scenario.”
https://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/taliban-kunduz.jpghttps://prod01-cdn07.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/04/taliban-kunduz.jpg
Taliban fighters hug each other a day after they overran the strategic northern
city of Kunduz, Sept. 29, 2015.
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
Gen. Campbell had just landed in Washington, D.C., when he heard the news from
Kunduz. The fall of the city had apparently come as a surprise to everyone,
including the Taliban. One exception was the governor of Kunduz, Omar Safi, who
spent most of his short 10-month tenure sounding desperate alarm at the
imminent fall of the city.
Safi told me he wrote 35 letters to the U.S. National Security Council, even
breaching protocol and emailing Gen. John Campbell directly for air support.
Campbell told Safi that the new mandate did not allow for close air support for
Afghan forces. Even so, before departing for Washington, in an effort to
decentralize command within forces, Campbell had deputized strike authority to
a subordinate, a tactical level commander who would make decisions in the pitch
of battle.
The city had been on the verge of collapse all through 2015, but had always
managed to remain under government control. It nearly fell in April, when the
Taliban began another bid for the city. Then came another scare in June, when
the northeastern districts fell to the Taliban while the center held. By the
fall, said the security analyst based in northern Afghanistan, “It was the
third time everyone had seen that movie.”
“I don’t think anyone had any clue about what was going on on the ground,” said
the security analyst, who monitored the fall of Kunduz closely. He remembers
calling up the political adviser to Gen. Campbell to inform him that the city
was about to fall. “I sent him a text saying the U.N. office had been overrun
and that it was on fire. He wrote back, ‘We just checked and it’s only a couple
of the outlying buildings that are on fire.’ If someone had said that about RS
HQ, ‘No, it’s not the HQ. It’s just the PX that’s on fire,’ I don’t think it
would have gone over so well.”
“Don’t forget intelligence is about information and misinformation.”
According to Brig. Gen. Ashraf Khan, Afghan air ops commander for the north,
less than 24 hours after Kunduz fell, Gen. Campbell authorized the use of
AC-130s by ground commanders.
In a telephone interview, Gen. Campbell said that he would not comment on rules
of engagement, but said, “If somebody was under attack and they needed to use
the AC-130, why would they have to wait until I landed to ask for permission to
do that? You know what I’m saying? You always have the right to self-defense.
I’m not talking Kunduz — I’m talking any time.”
“If they have to call their boss, who have to call their boss, who have to call
their boss, who have to call their boss, who have to call their boss, who has
to call me who’s on an airplane, by that time, the guys on the ground are dead.”
“There is always going to be somebody in charge,” Campbell said. “When you have
changes in leadership, you lay out who has the authority to do what, in all
cases.” He said that he had visited the site of a C-130 crash before he left
Afghanistan, and then as soon as he landed in Washington, he found out about
the Kunduz strike. “The initial reports said we had hit a hospital, and I know
we don’t target hospitals so something had to go wrong.”
In an ordinary scenario, an Afghan force on the ground requests an airstrike
through its chain of command at the Ministry of Defense, which in turn contacts
NATO. A request requires an eight-line form including the grid location, threat
level, and other details such as geographical or biographical information
submitted via email, and takes two to three days for approval, according to
flight coordinators. But in the heat of combat, strikes can be requested via an
unencrypted mobile phone and may be approved in less than 20 minutes, according
to an RS flight coordinator who spoke to The Intercept.
A former Afghan NDS official said that the initial raw report about insurgents
being in the MSF hospital was corroborated with signals intelligence — phone or
radio communications that were tracked back to the compound. These two streams
of information, he said, along with eyewitness accounts, elevated the
information into “finished intel,” indicating that the Taliban were inside the
hospital. Yet according to a former Afghan government adviser, the aftermath of
the hospital strike was marked by uncertainty. “Don’t forget intelligence is
about information and misinformation.”
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Afghan President Ashraf Ghani during a press conference at the presidential
palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Oct. 1, 2015.
Photo: Haroon Sabawoon/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
According to the former government adviser, in the days following the hospital
strike, the Afghans were under immense pressure from the U.S. military to stay
in line. President Ashraf Ghani, who issued a statement expressing his “deep
sorrow,” was sympathetic to MSF’s call for an independent fact-finding mission,
but when the U.S. refused to participate, the Afghans were “put in a position
of saying no.”
“The Americans put their foot down and said that’s not going to happen,” the
former adviser said. “[They] made it very clear that that could result in a
loss of support.” The threat of possible war crimes charges loomed over the
discussion.
In the absence of an independent investigation, a joint Afghan-NATO Combined
Civilian Casualty Assessment Team was deployed to Kunduz. President Ghani also
assigned an Afghan-led commission overseen by former NDS head Amrullah Saleh,
which ended up excluding the hospital strike from its investigation.
The MSF bombing brought to the surface the underlying tensions within the
coalition government, led by President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah
Abdullah. Discord between the two men had resulted in a standoff, which their
political rivals cited as the reason for the fall of Kunduz. Indeed, the defeat
came on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the national unity government,
which according to its detractors had achieved nothing. Even amid deteriorating
security, due to the persistent animus between the two leaders, Afghanistan did
not yet have a permanent defense minister.
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More than 20 Afghan government officials and members of security forces
interviewed for this article held as an unassailable belief that the Taliban
had attacked Afghan forces from inside the hospital. That deeply held
conviction remained resolute even in the face of mounting counterevidence.
“[The fall of] Kunduz was a considerable loss of face for the government,” the
former government adviser told me. National security adviser Hanif Atmar was
“belligerent,” he said, on the issue of Kunduz. “He is a very thoughtful and
intelligent person. He wouldn’t jump to conclusions. But in this case, it
didn’t seem like he wanted to find the truth.”
“It was a very emotional time for everybody,” the former government adviser
said. “It was a huge loss of prestige. Morale was zero.”
In this strategic and emotional nadir, according to Mark Bowden, the United
Nations deputy special representative for Afghanistan, there arose a feeling
that “things previously not legitimate became more legitimate.” The general
sense among the Afghan forces was that the war was going nowhere good. In a
losing battle, all becomes fair, including the bombing of a hospital that many
had come to believe was harboring insurgents.
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A police officer stands guard in front of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital
destroyed by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, Oct. 11, 2015.
Photo: Omid/Xinhua/Newscom
On the night of the hospital strike, a unit commander with the Ministry of
Defense special forces was at the police headquarters taking fire from the
direction of the hospital. “Vehicles were coming out of there, engaging, then
retreating,” he told me. When I pointed out that he couldn’t have seen the gate
of the hospital from where he was, several hundred meters away, he said that he
was sure because he had personally interrogated a cleaner who told him that the
hospital was full of “armed men using it as a cover.” The cleaner told the
commander that there were Pakistani generals using the hospital as a
recollection point and that they had set up a war room there. When I challenged
his line of vision again, he responded, “Anyone can claim anything. The truth
is different.”
Saleh, the author of the 200-page Afghan commission report on the fall of
Kunduz and head of one of the many informal political coalitions opposing the
current government, believed that the “hospital sanctity had been violated” and
held out as evidence 130 hours of recorded conversations with more than 600
interlocutors. “I spoke with the MSF country director,” Saleh told me recently.
“They don’t deny that the hospital was infiltrated by the Taliban.”
MSF has consistently denied that armed fighters were present in the hospital.
Saleh claimed that Afghan forces had been taking fire from the southeastern
wall of the hospital, used as a shield by the insurgents. Ismail Masood, chief
of staff to the governor of Kunduz, who sat in on meetings with the NDS and
other intelligence agencies, said he had also heard that “it was in the parking
area to the east where the Taliban were present.”
Neighbors, however, remembered something different. Abdul Wahab, a gatekeeper
working across the street from the hospital, told me that the Taliban regularly
brought their injured to the trauma center, but that he never saw any armed
insurgents enter it, nor did he recall seeing any weapons fire coming from the
hospital. Abdul Maroof, whose warehouse shares its north wall with the
hospital, said he saw “as many as a hundred” Taliban fighters entering the NDS
office across the street, but never the hospital.
MSF, for its part, stated that on the day of the strike, “No fighting was
taking place around the hospital, no planes were heard overhead, no gunshots
were reported, nor explosions in the vicinity of the hospital.”
“I have all my sympathies with the victims,” Saleh said. “But it doesn’t serve
the purpose of the survivor to say, yes, there was fighting. They have to show
themselves as victims, which they are anyway.” Saleh said the hospital was
“part of the tragedy but not the whole tragedy.” In a war that has seen a box
of propaganda leaflets dropped from a plane crush a 5-year-old girl to death,
and wedding parties assaulted by aircraft, a hospital bombing did not appear to
him to be out of the ordinary.
“Have you tasted fear?” Kabir asked. Before I could answer, he pulled out a
pistol. “When I put this pistol to your head, do you feel afraid?”
A former Afghan special forces captain was indignant at what he considered
unwarranted media coverage of the hospital strike. “This is going to limit
airstrikes,” he told me. “And without airstrikes, we would have lost Kunduz. We
need the Americans to stand with us,” he said. “Stories like these are going to
hurt innocent people. When Daesh take over Afghanistan, the first person to be
raped or killed will be you, the foreigner.”
“Afghans have little consideration for the Geneva Conventions,” a former senior
Western official told me. “Their main concern is continuing to have U.S.
backing and aerial support. Their biggest fear after the strike was that this
would put a chill on their being able to request U.S. air support when shit
hits the fan.”
Maj. Abdul Kabir, the air liaison officer, wanted me to understand how
difficult war can be. “Will you let your men get killed because of a silly
rule? Are you saying fighting is easy?” I said that I had never been in such a
situation but could imagine the challenge. “From one side, you have the Taliban
attacking you, and from another side, you have your soldiers saying they are
just meters away. And then we have these international rules that make it
difficult to fight the enemy.”
“Have you tasted fear?” Kabir asked. Before I could answer, he pulled out a
pistol. We were sitting in a hotel room in Mazar-e-Sharif, waiting to board a
helicopter to Kunduz. “When I put this pistol to your head, do you feel
afraid?” I told him that I understood the point he was making. “In war, you
don’t feel too kind for your enemy. You don’t show kindness because you want to
kill him so that you can save your own life.”
Others who could not fully imagine the American military’s capacity for failure
simply subscribed to ex post facto reasoning. “They cannot believe this is a
mistake, and so they work backwards,” Molinie said. They clung to “an
ideological vision of facts” and “saw things through the prism of their own
beliefs.”
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Afghan security forces walk past a Taliban fighter’s dead body after retaking
Kunduz from the Taliban, Oct. 4, 2015.
Photo: Jawed Dehsabzi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Lt. Abdullah Gard, who heads the Ministry of Interior’s Quick Reaction Force,
said he had been unhappy about the hospital ever since the MSF opened a clinic
in Chardara district, a Taliban stronghold. MSF had noticed that the patients
were experiencing delays that resulted in loss of limb, or life, and so last
June, the group opened the stabilization post on the other side of the front
line. To Gard and his men, that sealed the fate of the hospital. In the eyes of
the besieged Afghan military fighting a losing war, MSF had veered too far to
the other side. In the binaries that dictate the conflict, in which only two
positions are made possible, being a neutral player was an untenable position.
War makes monsters of the other; those who do not stand with us become those
who stand against us. “They are seen as belligerents in the fight rather than
an impartial group,” the security analyst based in northern Afghanistan told
me. “In the government’s eyes, Chardara went too far.”
Gard spoke of MSF with the personal hatred reserved for the truly perfidious.
He accused the group of “patching up fighters and sending them back out,” a
line I heard repeatedly. Cmdr. Abdul Wahab, head of the unit that guarded the
provincial chief of police compound, told me he could not understand why in
battle an insurgent could be killed, but the minute he was injured, he would be
taken to a hospital and given protective status. Wouldn’t it be easier, he
asked, wouldn’t the war be less protracted or bloody if they were allowed to
march in and take men when they were most compromised? He had visited the MSF
hospital three times to complain. Each time a foreign doctor explained the
hospital’s neutral status and its no-weapons policy, which mystified him.
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The destroyed Médecins Sans Frontières hospital after a U.S. airstrike in
Kunduz, Afghanistan, Oct. 11, 2015.
Photo: Omid/Xinhua/Newscom
The Kunduz attack was neither the first nor the last attack on a hospital run
by an international organization. On February 17, a Swedish-run clinic in
Wardak province was raided by the Afghan special forces. The troops barged into
the 10-bed clinic as helicopters circled above. Accompanying them were
English-speaking mentors who did not participate in the raid but were in the
vicinity when the Afghan forces grabbed two patients and a caretaker who
appeared to be underage, and dragged them to an abandoned shop. Twenty minutes
later, gunshots rang out. Later, all three were found executed. Officials from
Resolute Support informed the Swedish Committee that an investigation had been
opened.
This was at least the eighth time a medical facility supported by the Swedish
Committee had been raided or searched by international forces in four years.
Nearly all of the clinics the group operates are in Taliban-controlled or
contested territories, where need is greatest. One particular raid in 2009 in a
Swedish Committee-run clinic in Wardak came days after a NATO airstrike had
killed as many as 125 near Kunduz. In 2009, as in 2016, the airstrike inspired
outcry from international observers, but that raid, also a possible violation
of international law, did not garner much attention.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, between 2014 and
2015 there was a 50 percent increase in the number of threats or attacks on
medical facilities in Afghanistan that were reported to the organization.
Unlike the headline-grabbing Kunduz strike, many of these small slights and
violations go unnoticed, even as they chip away at something much more
integral. “There are clearly strong feelings within government [that] the
Taliban are legitimate targets wherever they are,” the U.N.’s Mark Bowden told
me.
After the Kunduz strike, Emergency, an international NGO, built a 40-foot
bunker beneath its trauma center in Helmand.
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A patient — later identified as 43-year-old Baynazar Mohammad Nazar, a husband
and father of four — lies dead on an operating table inside the MSF Kunduz
Trauma Center, Oct. 10, 2015.
Photo: Andrew Quilty/Oculi
On March 2, Gen. Campbell left his position without a promotion, raising
suspicion that his involvement, or at least his culpability, in the Kunduz
strike may be much larger than has been publicly revealed. He will retire on
May 1. Campbell had been rumored to be next in line to head U.S. Central
Command, the “heir apparent.” But the MSF incident appeared to have “played a
role in Campbell being put out to pasture,” a former Western official said.
Asked about being passed over for the Central Command position, Gen. Campbell
replied, “It’s not that people sit and think, ah shoot, I want to be the next
CENTCOM commander. I didn’t do that. We do whatever job we are assigned.” His
retirement, however, resulted from being offered a job he didn’t care to take.
“I mean, there are all sorts of rumors. I don’t know what goes on there, but
the secretary called me up and asked me to take up another command position. I
was very honored and thanked him for his trust and confidence, and to the
president as well, but for me at this point in time, it is not something I want
to do so I respectfully declined. That’s all.”
Campbell reiterated his November statements about the Pentagon’s investigation,
which may be released in redacted form tomorrow. About the initial claims of
collateral damage, he responded, “I would not authorize anybody to say
collateral damage. That’s stupid. All it does is upset people.”
“I don’t think the story changed,” he said. “I think we learned from the
investigation more and more. We just couldn’t talk about it until the
investigation was finished. Once the investigation was finished, then you have
to let all the disciplinary action play out.”
On March 16, U.S. defense officials indicated that more than a dozen
ground-level U.S. military personnel had been disciplined for misconduct
leading to the strike.
Deliberately targeting a hospital is a war crime, after all, but so is the
indiscriminate killing of civilians outside a hospital. And it’s worth noting,
according to a Western security analyst who is an expert on Kunduz, that “even
if they had struck the NDS headquarters, there still would have been civilian
casualties.” The NDS office, which the U.S. military has said was the intended
target, stands in a residential neighborhood, as do the private home and the
tea factory that were also bombed on the night of the MSF hospital strike. An
AC-130, the analyst pointed out, is a disproportionate and indiscriminate
weapon, not appropriate for use in civilian areas in the dead of night.
A former Afghan special forces commander who was at the command and control
center in Kunduz during the fight assured me I would never get to the bottom of
the attack. The reason why I couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened, he
said, was the fog of war. “Ground truth is impossible to know. Even those who
were there wouldn’t be able to tell you what they saw.” Not the MSF internal
investigation, not the joint Afghan-NATO inquiry, not the Saleh commission, and
certainly not the 5,000-page military investigation by U.S. Central Command
would tell us what happened that night, he assured me. “Have you ever been in a
fire fight? It passes like a dream.” The final sentence of the Saleh report
echoed his sentiment. “Facts are never solid and we cannot feel them and they
will remain this way.”
What is solid, however, are the 211 shells that were fired at a hospital in
northern Afghanistan one night last October, and that those shells were felt by
the 42 men, women, and children who were killed, and that they will remain that
way, victims of incompetence or prejudice or both. Ground truth may be elusive,
but it exists; someone along the military chain of command gave an order, which
directly resulted in the loss of innocent lives.
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