In Kunduz that night there were surgeons, nurses, cleaners and anaesthetists, and the patients they were keeping alive. It was the only trauma centre of its kind in northeastern Afghanistan, which meant gunshot and blast injuries from across the region came there to be operated on. Forty-two people were killed in 2015 — fourteen staff, patients, and relatives who had stayed to care for them.
MSF asked for the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission to look into it — the standing body set up under the Geneva Conventions protocols, which had never been used in the roughly thirty years since it was established. It required consent from the states involved, and that consent didn't come; the investigations that did follow were military ones.