Wars are being fought as in 'barbarian times', warns MSF chief

Attacks against civilians in war zones across the world have grown more indiscriminate due to a myopic focus by the major global powers on fighting terrorism, the head of the international charity Médecins Sans Frontières has said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Joanne Liu, the Canadian physician and president of MSF, issued a broad indictment of how modern warfare is conducted, declaring that world powers have failed in their duty to uphold the rules of conflict, threatening a return to “barbarian times”.

“We are in a completely different way of rules of engagement in conflicts,” she said during a visit to Beirut. “I still believe that what the Geneva convention and international humanitarian law brought to conflict was to mitigate war on civilians, and by not respecting that we are going backwards a hundred years. It’s barbarian times. I don’t think in the 21st century we should allow ourselves to drift there.

“If the rules are to be changed, we want to be told,” she said. The past few months have seen an increased ferocity of attacks on health facilities, especially in the Middle East.

Last month, airstrikes hit an MSF supported hospital in Syria’s opposition-controlled Idlib province, killing 11 people, the 14th attack on medical facilities since the start of the year. A total of 94 airstrikes and shelling attacks targeted facilities backed by the organisation in Syria in 2015 alone.

Over the past five months, two MSF hospitals have been attacked in Yemen, as well as one mobile clinic and an ambulance belonging to the organisation, which is operating in the midst of a war where a coalition led by Saudi Arabia is fighting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.

Last October, an MSF hospital in Afghanistan’s Kunduz district was destroyed after an hour of sustained airstrikes by the United States, despite repeated calls by the charity to the American-led coalition and the fact its GPS coordinates had been provided in advance.

“I think the last [attack in Syria] and the event in Kunduz, what is striking is the precision of the attack, the insistence of the attack and the persistence of the attack over time,” she said.

MSF has continued to insist on an independent investigation into the Kunduz strikes – Liu said it was obvious the attack was very precise, since even trees around the hospital compound were completely intact, whereas much of the hospital itself was burned to the ground.