In the days following the May 12 attack on Dasht-e-Barchi hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan, it has become clear that what happened that day was a deliberate assault on a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) maternity ward with the purpose of killing mothers in cold blood.
“I went back the day after the attack and what I saw in the maternity demonstrates it was a systematic shooting of the mothers,” said Frederic Bonnot, MSF’s head of programs in Afghanistan. “They went through the rooms in the maternity, shooting women in their beds. It was methodical. Walls sprayed with bullets, blood on the floors in the rooms, vehicles burnt out and windows shot through.”
Official numbers indicate that 24 people were killed and at least 20 more injured in the attack, a large majority of them patients. MSF, who has been supporting the facility for six years, has been able to confirm that 26 mothers were hospitalized at the time of the attack. Eleven women were killed, three of them in the delivery room with their unborn babies, and five others were injured. Ten managed to find shelter in safe rooms along with many health workers. Also among the dead are two young boys and an Afghan midwife working with MSF. Two newborn babies were wounded, one of whom was transferred to another hospital for emergency surgery after being shot in the leg, as well as three Afghan MSF staff members.
