Details of an airstrike against a Doctors Without Borders (MSF) clinic in the town of Maarat al-Numaan, which killed at least 25 civilians, are becoming more difficult today, as MSF revealed they’d never actually told either the Syrian or Russian government where the clinic was before the strike.
MSF had accused the Monday strike of “deliberately” targeting the facility, and leaving a large chunk of northern Idlib Province without access to medical care. While this all is true, it’s unclear if officials had any idea what the facility they were targeting was.
MSF officials say that they were afraid giving the Syrians GPS coordinates for the site, standard practice the world over, would leave it more open to targeting, and are arguing that as civilian infrastructure it shouldn’t have been targeted either way.
Whether or not the Syrian military knew the site was a hospital, however, the lack of communication gives them an easy out simply by insisting they didn’t know, as again the standard procedure is to always report hospital locations to nations carrying out airstrikes, and that they simply assumed it wasn’t a hospital, since they had no communication to the contrary.
The important point you failed to mention is that they didn’t give the GPS coordinates because they were afraid it would be hit deliberately – which you did say – but that it was because THAT’S WHAT THE US DID IN KUNDIZ. THAT’S the important point.
richardstevenhack (commenter here) is trying to make a point but fails to be coherent.
In Kunduz (Afghanistan) it was the US Air Force which hit the MSF hospital. They had been given the coordinates. In Syria it was supposedly (we are told by US media sources) that it was Russian or Syrian attackers.
Yes, providing GPS info isn’t a guarantee against attack, but so far as we know ONLY the US has disregarded those GPS coordinates and attacked a non military target. Not the Russians or Syrians.
MSF hasn’t announced some new protocol where such GPS data won’t be provided to military forces to prevent attack, have they?
To claim that the Syrian attack was a logical move based upon what happened in Kunduz is a stretch. Instead it was foolish if not suicidal.
The result is that the Russians/Syrians are publicly accused (in Western media) of war crimes while in Afghanistan the US Air Force has mumbled apologies and has spent months in “investigating” why this happened. No mention in US media of deliberate targeting or war crimes. I suspect eventually some junior AF officer will be given a letter of admonishment and the matter will disappear down the Memory Hole.