Doctors With Enemies: Did Afghan Forces Target the MSF Hospital?

[eridani]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html?_r=3

In 2011, M.S.F. opened the hospital in Kunduz, a location it chose because it believed, presciently, that the province’s bloody past presaged a violent future. But some members of the Afghan government and security forces there had little respect for M.S.F.’s neutrality and resented its treatment of wounded Taliban. When I visited Kunduz in November, their anger was still surprisingly raw, despite the recent destruction of the hospital. “They give them medicine; they transport and treat their injured,” Gard, the commander of the quick-­reaction force, told me. “Their existence is a big problem for us.” And though the hospital treated many more wounded for the government, there were rumors that M.S.F. had carried out unnecessary amputations on them, according to Fawzia Yaftali, a member of the provincial council. “The general perception was that M.S.F. supported the Taliban,” she said.

On July 1, an episode occurred that should have been, in retrospect, a warning sign for all involved. A team of Afghan police commandos from elite units mentored by United States and NATO special forces — the 222 and 333 Battalions, which were later part of the Afghan forces sent to Kunduz with the Green Berets — had arrived in Kunduz Province to track a high-­value target, a militant commander named Abu Huzaifa. After targeting Huzaifa in an airstrike, the commandos believed that he had been wounded and taken to the M.S.F. hospital in Kunduz City. They drove there and forced their way inside, where they physically assaulted the staff members and fired their weapons into the air, according to M.S.F. Huzaifa was nowhere to be found.

“It was a kind of wild intrusion,” Molinie said. After M.S.F. phoned the governor and the police chief, the commandos were called off. Furious that the sanctity of the hospital had been violated, M.S.F. closed it to new admissions for five days, until officials received guarantees from Kabul that it would be respected. Huzaifa would be killed seven weeks later — by an American drone, according to a senior Afghan special forces commander — but bitterness about the hospital raid lingered among the Kunduz security forces. “They hid him,” Gard told me, without offering any evidence. His men had accompanied the police commandos to the hospital. “The people who work there are traitors, all of them.”