Obama says sorry for Kunduz strike

WASHINGTON—US President Barack Obama on Wednesday apologized to Doctors Without Borders (MSF) for a deadly US air strike on an Afghan hospital, as the medical charity demanded an international investigation.

Three separate probes by the US military, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Afghan officials are under way into Saturday’s catastrophic strike in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, which left 22 people dead.

The US military offered shifting explanations for the bombing raid, from initially talking about “collateral damage” to now admitting, as Obama did in his call to MSF chief Joanne Liu, that the strike was a mistake.

Obama called Liu to “apologize and express his condolences for the MSF staff and patients who were killed and injured when a US military air strike mistakenly struck an MSF field hospital in Kunduz,” White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said.

The president told Liu of his “great respect” for MSF’s work and assured her that the Pentagon probe would “provide a transparent, thorough and objective accounting of the facts and circumstances of the incident,” Earnest said.

But the charity, which condemned the attack as a war crime, stressed the need for an international inquiry, saying the bombing raid was in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

“We cannot rely on an internal military investigation,” Liu told reporters in Geneva, insisting that the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission should probe the bombing. “This was not just an attack on our hospital; it was an attack on the Geneva Conventions,” Liu said. “This cannot be tolerated.”