Afghan Forces Requested Hospital Airstrike

The top commander of US and coalition forces has said Afghan troops requested an airstrike which hit a hospital in Kunduz, killing 22 people.

General John Campbell, speaking at the Pentagon, said he was correcting an initial statement which said the airstrike had been employed to defend US forces who had come under fire from the Taliban.
He said the Afghan military advised US special operations forces on the ground that they needed air support.
"An airstrike was then called to eliminate the Taliban threat and several civilians were accidentally struck," he said.
"This is different from the initial reports which indicated that the US forces were threatened and the airstrike was called on their behalf.

http://news.sky.com/story/1564230/afghan-forces-requested-hospital-airstrike

Afghan conflict: MSF 'disgust' at government hospital claims

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has said it is "disgusted" by Afghan government statements justifying an air strike on its hospital in Kunduz, calling it an "admission of a war crime".

The charity blames US-led Nato forces for Saturday's attack which killed at least 22 people, including MSF staff.

The US is investigating the incident.

Afghan government forces have regained control of much of Kunduz from Taliban fighters who overran the strategic northern city last week.

Sites that appear to have been retaken by government troops include the police chief's office, the central square and the governor's compound, where security forces were shown by local media carrying the national flag.

Residents were reported to be venturing out of their homes and shops reopening on Monday. However, there were still pockets of Taliban resistance on the outskirts of Kunduz.

'Raze to the ground'

US-led Nato forces provided back-up for Afghan troops last week as they battled to regain Kunduz.

On Saturday the Afghan defence ministry said "armed terrorists" were using the hospital "as a position to target Afghan forces and civilians".

MSF said in a statement: "These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital - with more than 180 staff and patients inside - because they claim that members of the Taliban were present.



"This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimise the attack as 'collateral damage.'"
The Pentagon says a full, transparent investigation will be conducted into the incident. On Monday the top coalition commander in Afghanistan, Gen John Campbell, said it was Afghan forces that had called in the airstrike that hit the clinic.

Reversing an earlier Pentagon statement, he also said US forces had not been under fire at the time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34440965
MSF has called for an independent investigation by an international body.

Inexcusable.  The Hospital authorities and doctors said they had informed the Pentagon of their coordinates many times.

Are they telling us our own people have to die because of a clerical function??

Earth to US Military: GET IT RIGHT OR GET OUT!

ladies and gentlemen allow me to present quill the war expert,read everything he knows about war in a book.

I remember once during an attack our sniper pair got shot up by some young and inexperienced gunners who mistook them for enemy, and they were only about 150m away.

It was a combination of human error/poor briefing and the pre-dawn limited visibility you see, smashed up their radios and their body armour.

funny as fuck it was, the snipers didnt think so though and had a sense of humour failure and the dude who shot em up had to hide away when they came back in after the attack, but he made amends with a crate of beer and all was forgiven

obviously not all blue-on-blue exchanges are as funny or as harmless and yet despite the best intentions and best professionalism they still happen

dont they explain that in your books??

smelly-bandit wrote:ladies and gentlemen allow me to present quill the war expert,read everything he knows about war in a book.

I remember once during an attack our sniper pair got shot up by some young and inexperienced gunners who mistook them for enemy,    and they were only about 150m away.

It was a combination of human error/poor briefing and the pre-dawn limited visibility you see, smashed up their radios and their body armour.

funny as fuck it was, the snipers didnt think so though and had a sense of humour failure and the dude who shot em up had to hide away when they came back in after the attack, but he made amends with a crate of beer and all was forgiven

obviously not all blue-on-blue exchanges are as funny or as harmless and yet despite the best intentions and best professionalism they still happen

dont they explain that in your books??

I sympathize with what you are saying, smells. But when you were in the battlefield, they were shooting smooth-bore rifles and charging with bayonets.

Today we have a computer-controlled operations center, and the guy in the field can be taking a piss and he will get the data. If a hospital repeatedly sends a message that these are the coordinates, and that doesn't get into the system, someone is intentionally withholding information. That used to be called treason.

So it's a discipline problem...and that comes from the top.

Original Quill wrote:

smelly-bandit wrote:ladies and gentlemen allow me to present quill the war expert,read everything he knows about war in a book.

I remember once during an attack our sniper pair got shot up by some young and inexperienced gunners who mistook them for enemy,    and they were only about 150m away.

It was a combination of human error/poor briefing and the pre-dawn limited visibility you see, smashed up their radios and their body armour.

funny as fuck it was, the snipers didnt think so though and had a sense of humour failure and the dude who shot em up had to hide away when they came back in after the attack, but he made amends with a crate of beer and all was forgiven

obviously not all blue-on-blue exchanges are as funny or as harmless and yet despite the best intentions and best professionalism they still happen

dont they explain that in your books??

I sympathize with what you are saying, smells.  But when you were in the battlefield, they were shooting smooth-bore rifles and charging with bayonets.

Today we have a computer-controlled operations center, and the guy in the field can be taking a piss and he will get the data.  If a hospital repeatedly sends a message that these are the coordinates, and that doesn't get into the system, someone is intentionally withholding information.  That used to be called treason.

So it's a discipline problem...and that comes from the top.

incorrect

human error is ALWAYS to blame

if i remember correctly there was an incident where yank apache pilots smashed up a column of either brit vehicles or other americans vehicles during desert stom, the pilot knew about the friendly vehicles, he had the grids for where the convoy was and yet he still hit them, he was in fact hunting an iraqi convoy.

what happened was that his apache had been blown off course

so let me explain it in layman terms

a map is devided into what we call grid squares, and its from reading those grids that we get co-ordinates

in this example lets say all the east-west lines are numbers and the north-south lines are letters, we always read the particular grid we are in from the bottom left (S.W) corner of the square and we always give the north-south first and the east-west second

so for instance grid A1, B6 etc

in reality all the references are numbers so realistically grid 0167 or 0689

if you give it the wrong way round it can be dozens if not hundreds of kilometers out, if it is taken down incorrectly it can be out


so back to the apache pilot, what happened to him was that he was blown off course, and didnt realise it, so instead of him being in grid A6 where he thought he was hunting an iraq vehcile convoy, he had been blown off course into grid C7 which was where the friendly vehicles were.

his human error was two-fold

firstly he didnt confirm his grids and secondly he didnt or perhaps hadnt been trained to idntify heat the signatures ofenemy and friendly vehicles

i dont think there was any malicious intention

human error

the trouble with "friendly fire" is......is that it isnt

Gen. John Cambell agrees it wasn't a mistake, it was done on purpose:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/afghan-forces-requested-us-airstrike-hit-hospital-gen/story?id=34255265

I'm suspicious that this was a 'blue on blue' incident (when NATO forces in blue used to do exercises, and represented the Warsaw Pact countries as orange). If Afghans brought in the fire on the hospital, it may well have been intentional. A new form of friendly assault.

Pilots can only target what they are given

If the Afghans called it in then its on them

smelly-bandit wrote:Pilots can only target what they are given

If the Afghans called it in then its on them

Well...except that the US let itself be led by the ring in it's nose. Technically, the Afghans can't call in an airstrike. They convinced a small US unit that was training with them to call in the strikes.

Apparently this has been the way they are operating. I would argue protocol with you, but the only thing I care about is to get out. That'll solve any problems.

You cannot argue protocol with me ,since you don't know anything about military protocol quill

Afraid you are both behind the times, the Americans have said it was them.




Afghan hospital bombing: MSF demands investigation under Geneva conventions
Inquiry called for to gather facts from US, Nato and Afghanistan comes after US admission that its forces called in deadly airstrike on Kunduz hospital

Médecins sans Frontières has called for an independent inquiry under the Geneva conventions into a US airstrike on a hospital in northern Afghanistan that killed at least 22 people.

The medical charity said the investigation, which can be set up at the request of a single state under the conventions, would gather facts and evidence from the US, Nato and Afghanistan.

“If we let this go, we are basically giving a blank cheque to any countries at war,” Joanne Liu, MSF international president said, calling on the relatively obscure international humanitarian fact-finding commission (IHFFC), to open the investigation.

It would be a first step, aimed to establish facts about the incident and the chain of command that led to the strike, MSF said. Only then would it decide whether to bring criminal charges for loss of life and damage.
The Geneva conventions are a set of treaties regarding humanitarian issues of civilians and combatants in wartime.

MSF’s call for an investigation was supported on Wednesday by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which said it would welcome any impartial probe into what happened in Kunduz.

“We have always been supportive of the IHFFC. If it can help to clarify the facts surrounding this tragic incident which led to the deaths of medical staff and patients in a health care facility, which should be protected under the laws of armed conflict, that would be a positive development,” said Helen Durham, the ICRC’s director of international law and policy.

However it was unclear on Wednesday how far the request could go. Since it was first established in 1991, the IHFFC has never once been on a fact-finding mission because it has never secured the agreement of the warring parties involved in any incident it has sought to investigate.
The IHFFC’s president, Gisela Perren-Klingler, told the Guardian she had received MSF’s request for an investigation on Tuesday night and had already been in touch with the US and Afghan governments, offering the commission’s services.

But she added: “We have activated ourselves but we cannot go on mission without being asked in by a member state, and MSF is not a state.”

Perren-Klingler, a Swiss doctor specialising in the treatment of psychological trauma from conflict, said the commission had also been in touch with some of America’s Nato allies to seek support for its request, and would seek to build support in public opinion. “What we are saying is that we are the only permanent, independent, commission for international humanitarian law. Our report will be confidential and goes to both governments concerned. We are not an accountability mechanism, so we are different from the ICC [International Criminal Court].”

The IHFFC’s fifteen members, who include diplomats, military officers, medical doctors and legal academics, have full time jobs in their countries of origin around the world, and their involvement - if a mission ever went ahead - would depend on their availability.

MSF’s appeal followed an admission by the US that American special operations forces – not their Afghan allies – called in the deadly airstrike on the MSF hospital in Kunduz.

Gen John Campbell, the commander of the US and Nato war in Afghanistan, reiterated before a Senate panel that Afghan forces had requested US air cover after being engaged in a “tenacious fight” to retake Kunduz from the Taliban.




But, modifying the account he gave at a press conference on Monday, Campbell said those Afghan forces had not directly communicated with the US pilots of an AC-130 gunship overhead. “Even though the Afghans request that support, it still has to go through a rigorous US procedure to enable fires to go on the ground. We had a special operations unit that was in close vicinity that was talking to the aircraft that delivered those fires,” Campbell told the Senate armed services committee on Tuesday morning.

The airstrike on the hospital was among the worst and most visible cases of civilian deaths caused by US forces during the 14-year war that Barack Obama declared all but over. It killed 12 MSF staff as well as 10 patients who had sought medical treatment after the Taliban overran Kunduz last weekend. Three children died in the airstrike, which came in multiple waves and burned patients alive in their beds.



As is routine practice for MSF in conflict areas, it had communicated the exact location of the hospital to all parties in the conflict. MSF said the bombing took place despite the fact that it had provided the GPS coordinates of the trauma hospital to coalition and Afghan military and civilian officials as recently as Tuesday 29 September, to avoid the hospital being hit.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/07/afghan-hospital-bombing-msf-demands-investigation-under-geneva-conventions

Oh goody

Another itrelavnt and exceptionally long winded copy and paste

Sassy do you understand that no one listens to you

Oh dear, sorry you have such a short attention span Smelly, expect you are still at the Janet and John stage.

all im saying is you come across like a loon who is motivated by hatred which you dont understand.

long ass copy and paste jobs dont REACH people in the same way that passionate arguments do.