An Unusual Day and an Unusual Blip

Today was a fairly normal at work. I took a walk at lunchtime and took some images of the autumn in Härnösand and figured out I’d use one of them on Blip today.
Then I opened a mail about the bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz and clicked a link downloading MSF's preliminary internal review of what happened. Reading it made me very angry and is part of the reason this picture represents the 10th November 2015 for me. There was no way I could post a lovely picture of Swedish autumn after reading this.
You can download a copy of the report yourself.
It only takes 15 minutes to read and is actually quite interesting as it takes up the ethics and routines of running a hospital in that situation, and how they inform and gain the consent of all the parties involved in the conflict, partly as a way of ensuring the safety of the staff and patients. It explains how all parties had acknowledged the receipt of the exact coordinates of the hospital. Then it gives a detailed account of the attack and the aftermath.
I’d always assumed this was one of those “fog of war” incidents where a hospital accidentally got bombed but the report makes clear this was a sustained assault deliberately aimed at the main hospital building and lasting over an hour.
If you think there should be an independent investigation into the attack here’s a link to a petition asking for exactly that.
Destroying the only hospital treating civilians in that corner of the country seems a strange way to win the hearts and minds of the local population....

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