Doctors Without Borders: we received no advance warning of US airstrike - the Guardian

Afghanistan:  Such action would be a violation of the US Defense Department’s own manual governing the rules of war, as President Obama calls MSF president to apologize
The US military never gave Doctors Without Borders prior notification of a deadly airstrike on its field hospital in Kunduz, the aid group said on Wednesday, in an apparent violation of the Pentagon’s own instructions on the rules of war.

“We had not received any warning of the strike,” said Jason Cone, US executive director of the charity – also known as Médecins sans Frontières – five days after the Saturday morning US strike that killed 22 staff and patients and injured 37 more.

Barack Obama called MSF’s international president, Joanne Liu, on Wednesday morning to apologize for the air strike, the White House said.  The president called Liu “to apologize and express his condolences for the MSF staff and patients who were killed and injured”, according to Obama’s secretary Josh Earnest.

“The president assured Dr Liu that the Department of Defense investigation currently underway would provide a transparent, thorough and objective account of the facts and circumstances of the incident and that, if necessary, the president would implement changes that would make tragedies like this one less likely to occur in the future,” Earnest said.

But MSF intensified its pressure on the US by calling for an independent – and unprecedented – inquiry into the incident, arguing that the US, Nato and Afghan forces could not be relied on to investigate themselves.  “This was not just an attack on our hospital – it was an attack on the Geneva conventions. This cannot be tolerated,” said Liu.

A 2015 Pentagon manual on adherence to the rules of war explicitly requires such notification.

“[P]rotection for civilian hospitals may cease only after due warning has been given, naming, in all appropriate cases, a reasonable time limit, and after such warning has remained unheeded,” reads a section of the June 2015 Department of Defense law of war manual. 

The commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General John Campbell, told a US Senate panel on Tuesday that although US special operations forces on the ground in Kunduz called in a US AC-130 gunship strike on the hospital, following an Afghan request for assistance, “we would never intentionally target a protected medical facility”. - Read More at the Guardian

Doctors Without Borders: we received no advance warning of US airstrike

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