Why Bombing the Kunduz Hospital Was Probably a War Crime
Did the U.S. military commit a war crime when it bombed a hospital in
the Afghan city of Kunduz and killed at least 22 people? It’s too early
for experts to say for certain, but there’s good reason to believe the
attack may have violated international humanitarian law.
Hospitals enjoy special status protecting them from deliberate
attack, and they are generally filled with protected persons — medical
personnel, civilians, and sick or wounded soldiers, enemy as well as
friendly — none of whom may be willfully wounded or killed.
“While hospitals can lose that protection if they’re being used for
military purposes, the standard is very high,” says James Ross, the
legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch. What if the
unsubstantiated Afghan claims about Taliban fighters being deployed at
the hospital are true? “Even if this were the case it would have not
have allowed for the kind of attacks that struck the hospital,” Ross
told me.
On October 3, a U.S. AC-130 gunship fired on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, for more than 30 minutes,
killing 12 staff members and at least 10 patients while wounding 37
others. “There are no words for how terrible it was,” said MSF nurse
Lajos Zoltan Jecs, who was in the trauma center during the airstrike.
“In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds. The
first moments were just chaos. Enough staff had survived, so we could
help all the wounded with treatable wounds. But there were too many that
we couldn’t help.”
