Fatal raid on northwest Syria hospital deliberate: MSF

Doctors Without Borders has sharply condemned a deadly aerial attack against its medical facility in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib and said the raid was not “accidental.”

The Paris-based medical aid group, known by its French acronym MSF, confirmed seven people were killed after one of its health facilities was hit by four missiles within minutes of each other in the Maarat al-Numaan city of Syria’s Idlib Province.

The quick succession “leads us to believe that ... it wasn’t an accidental attack, that it was deliberate,” said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders operations in Syria.

Massimiliano Rebaudengo, MSF’s head mission, also said the strike “appears to be a deliberate attack on a health structure and we condemn this attack in the strongest possible terms.”

The MSF said five patients, a caretaker and a guard were among the dead, while eight staff members were missing and presumed dead following the airstrike.

Besides the MSF-run clinic, four other medical facilities and two schools in Idlib as well as Syria’s northwestern province of Aleppo came under similar attacks. The UN says 50 civilians lost their lives in the raids.

Syrian Ambassador to Russia Riyad Haddad said on Monday Moscow’s fighter jets had nothing to do with the airstrike, adding “intelligence information” showed US warplanes carried out the attack.

Last October, US fighter jets attacked an MSF-run clinic Afghanistan’s embattled city of Kunduz, killing at least 30 people. Washington claimed the raid was a mistake, but the medical charity said the assault seems to have had no purpose but to “kill and destroy.”

EA