Philippine Daily Inquirer

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.”

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Philippines