Before-and-after video shows what US airstrikes did to the MSF-run hospital in Afghanistan

GlobalPost
This screengrab taken from a video provided by Doctors Without Borders shows MSF medical staff treating a patient at the aid agency's hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Since 2011, tens of thousands of Afghan men, women and children have received life- and limb-saving treatment at a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders in the Taliban-controlled city of Kunduz.

The trauma facility was the only one of its kind in northeastern Afghanistan, according to the global charity group, which is also known by its French-language acronym MSF. 

But that changed on Saturday when US forces "mistakenly" bombed the hospital, killing at least 22 people and injured dozens of others. 

Twelve medical staff died in the attack. A beyond-outraged MSF now wants the never-before-used International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to investigate and determine whether a “war crime” has been committed.  

(The IHFFC was set up under the Geneva Conventions in 1991 and can be activated only at the request of a member state.)

As it calls for the IHFFC to investigate Saturday's airstrike, MSF has released this video of daily operations at the trauma center in 2011, 2014 and 2015, including footage taken after the US bombing.

 

For most of the four-minute video, medical staff can be seen providing treatment to men, women and children at the well-equipped facility. It is not known if any of the people featured in the video were among the casualties of Saturday's attack, in which doctors and patients reportedly burned to death. 

The final seconds of the video show the hospital after it was bombed.

Tens of thousands of patients received free care at the hospital during the four years it was operated by MSF, including more than 22,000 patients in 2014 alone, the aid agency said.

More than 5,900 operations were performed last year.

A video posted on MSF's YouTube account also shows the extensive damage to the center caused by the airstrike.

 

At the time of the attack, 105 patients and their caretakers were inside, as well as than 80 MSF staff, MSF said.

While the United States, NATO and Afghanistan are already investigating the tragedy, for which the United States has taken responsibility, MSF wants an impartial inquiry to clear up the “inconsistencies between the US and Afghan accounts" of the incident.

The airstrike “was not just an attack on our hospital, it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions. This cannot be tolerated,” MSF President Joanne Liu told reporters on Wednesday.

“We ask signatory states to activate the commission to establish the truth and to reassert the protected status of hospitals in conflicts. If we let this go, we are basically giving a blank check to any countries at war.”

US President Barack Obama apologized for the strike on Wednesday in a call to Liu, the White House said.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters "there is no evidence that ... I've seen or that anybody else has presented that indicate that this was anything other than a terrible, tragic accident."

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