Humanitarian non-governmental organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) hopes to open a new hospital in Afghanistan's northern city of Kunduz in the second half of 2019, Djoen Besselink, the head of the MSF mission in Afghanistan, told Sputnik
KABUL (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th December, 2018) Humanitarian non-governmental organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) hopes to open a new hospital in Afghanistan's northern city of Kunduz in the second half of 2019, Djoen Besselink, the head of the MSF mission in Afghanistan, told Sputnik.
"So in Kunduz we started building a hospital, so we got a nice piece of land which was donated from the Ministry of Health. The teams are on the ground and it will take a long time. But they started, they are on the ground. The design has been done, the master plan is done ... Hopefully, the second half of 2019 [is when] we can see the first patient," Besselink said.
The mission head added that the MSF was also constructing a hospital in the city of Kandahar in addition to other projects.
On October 3, 2015, the US airstrikes destroyed the MSF 92-bed trauma hospital in Kunduz, killing 42 people and injuring 37 others. According to the MSF, the hospital was the only facility treating major trauma injuries in northeastern Afghanistan. Following the attack, the US military said it had received reports that active Taliban militants were in the hospital building, while the MSF staff reported no armed fighters in the hospital prior to the airstrike.
Afghanistan has long been suffering from political, social and security-related instability due to simmering insurgency, including that of the Taliban movement and the Islamic State terrorist group (outlawed in Russia).
