Deadly US Assault on Kunduz Hospital Was Intentional: Survivors

It was like the end of the world, Anayatullah Nazari said. "It was like they were determined to kill us all and that nobody would survive. It was like doomsday, nothing I could ever imagine."

More than six weeks after a US Air Force AC-130 gunship repeatedly struck a well-marked Doctors Without Borders hospital, killing 30 people in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, official US, NATO and Afghan government reviews have yet to be released.

But a dozen survivors interviewed by The Associated Press are convinced that the assault on the hospital — which treated wounded Taliban and government fighters alike — was no accident.

They say it was sustained and focused on destroying the main hospital building, which the aid agency says "correlates exactly" with GPS coordinates it had given to all parties in the conflict.

A NATO general blamed human and technical errors for the attack. The Pentagon insists that the Americans involved in ordering the strike didn't realize it was a hospital.

If they did, it would be a war crime.

There were 105 patients, 140 Afghan staffers and nine international staff inside, along with dozens of people caring for friends and relatives, as is the Afghan custom.

When the US attack on Oct. 3 was finally over, some had been decapitated. Some bled to death after having limbs shot off. Some were burned beyond recognition. Two patients died on operating tables. Others died because medicine and blood supplies were destroyed. Those too ill to move were incinerated in their beds.

"One of my colleagues was trying to run away from the plane that kept coming back over the hospital," said a nurse who had gone outside to get some fresh air when the attack began.

"He ran from building to building but the plane was following him. Two other colleagues, Khalid and Tahseel, were also followed by the plane. Tahseel was hit by the guns fired from the plane and died. Khalid was injured," the nurse said, speaking on condition of anonymity for his own security.

Survivors interviewed by the AP said the compound was peaceful before the attack, and that MSF's no-guns policy was honored.

US President Barack Obama has apologized to the MSF, without explaining why the US military's chain of command approved the attack.

MSF staff frantically called and texted US military contacts in Washington, NATO's mission in Kabul and the UN's civilian-military liaison office for humanitarian affairs in Kabul to call it off, but the Americans kept firing for more than an hour, survivors said.

A hospital security guard who also asked not to be named, for the sake of his own security, said he entered the still-smoldering remains of the intensive care unit and found that "only one person was alive — injured but alive."

"The rest were all dead. Doctors and patients were just burned. And while we were taking stock of the injured, four doctors died in the meeting room. A couple of the foreign doctors jumped out of the windows to escape the attack — it's a miracle they survived," the guard said.

Anayatullah Hamdard, an agriculture professor at Kunduz University, recovered the body of his father, Dr. Abdul Sattar. "He was completely burned. I couldn't even see his face," Hamdard said.