WASHINGTON—The top US commander in Afghanistan said on Wednesday that multiple service members were suspended from duty following an investigation into the deadly air strike last month on a hospital in Kunduz.
Gen. Joseph Campbell said the October 3 strike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital, which killed 30 civilians and left 30 others wounded, was caused by human error compounded by technical malfunctions onboard the AC-130 attack aircraft.
The medical facility was misidentified as a target by US military personnel who believed they were striking a different building several hundred meters away where there were reports of Taliban fighters, he said. The hospital was on the military’s so-called no-strike list.
Campbell did not identify the names or number of individuals suspended and did not say whether they would face disciplinary or criminal charges.
“The cornerstone of our military justice system is the independence of decision-makers following a thorough investigation such as this one,” he said. “We will study what went wrong and take the right steps to prevent it in the future.”
According to the military’s investigation, the special operations gunship had sought to attack a building suspected of being used as a base by Taliban insurgents, but the location the US crew had been given turned out to be an open field. The crew decided to open fire on a nearby large building, not knowing that it was the Doctors Without Borders hospital.
An onboard targeting computer that might have warned the gunship crew that the building was a hospital, and thus off-limits, was malfunctioning, the investigation found. And because the gunship had been diverted from another mission, the crew had not been briefed on the location of the hospital.
The summary did not answer all the questions about what went wrong, including whether the errors identified in the report constitute war crimes.
Doctors Without Borders has said they likely would rise to that level.
According to the report, no US military personnel were in visual range of the hospital when Afghan forces requested the air strike, claiming they were under fire.
When the call for help came from the Afghan troops, a US special forces team in another part of Kunduz called in the strike. The Afghan forces had not provided map coordinates of the former intelligence service headquarters where the Taliban fighters were believed to be. Instead they had described its location, and the US special operations team passed the information by radio to the AC-130.
When the aircraft neared Kunduz but was still beyond firing range, the crew took an initial look using long-range video cameras at what it thought was the proper target, the investigation found.
When the gunship flew closer to the location, the crew members did not reassess whether they had identified the proper location.
It remains unclear why the crew opened fire on a building where there was apparently no sign of an active firefight, despite being called in after Afghans claimed they were being attacked. An AC-130 is normally equipped with infrared surveillance cameras capable of detecting gunfire on the ground.
Just after 2 a.m. on October 3, the gunship opened fire. The aircraft made multiple passes over the hospital, the largest building in a compound containing half-a-dozen other structures, firing heavy munitions that left the hospital in flames. In several cases, people running from the building were gunned down, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Officials of the medical organization have said repeatedly that no gunfire was coming from the hospital compound and that although firefights had occurred nearby earlier in the day, no fighting was under way when the air strike took place.
The attack destroyed the main hospital building, where medical personnel were catching up on a backlog of surgeries, taking advantage of the first quiet night since Taliban forces seized control of Kunduz five days earlier.
Survivors described earth-shaking explosions that engulfed the building in flames.
Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, had reminded the US military of the precise coordinates of the hospital multiple times in the days before the air strike, a warning acknowledged in the military investigation, the officer said.
When the attack began, MSF representatives in Washington and Kabul made frantic attempts to get the bombing stopped. At least 15 calls and text messages were exchanged with US, Afghan, United Nations and Red Cross officials, according to a log of the communications included in the report.
Nearly an hour into the attack, MSF said, an American official in Afghanistan responded, “I’ll do my best, praying for you all.”