They've always been intelligence targets. Any organization closely tied to regional conflicts, and therefore intelligence agencies and the military, is going to be a target.
Red Cross and Unicef show up everywhere there's a serious conflict. Often the very first western organizations there. The job of most intel agencies is to keep their governments up to date on those conflicts. Especially one involved in plenty of global conflicts like Russia.
I'm sure the US embeds agents with them all the time.
Also good for outrage, the main ingredient of modern media. Once the enemy fires on a Red Cross branded outpost, they must be the bad guys, no matter how many of the doctors were actually intelligence operatives.
Using NGOs like this should be as unacceptable as using outright human shields, but as always, it's different when the perfidious foreigners do it.
> Once the enemy fires on a Red Cross branded outpost, they must be the bad guys, no matter how many of the doctors were actually intelligence operatives.
I mean, yes? At what number of intelligence operatives would firing at Red Cross workers be a good thing?
> Using NGOs like this should be as unacceptable as using outright human shields
Yes. But, like human shields, firing on them with disregard will indeed make people think you're the bad guys.
"The misguided vaccine program in Pakistan was started in a poor neighborhood of Abbottabad, no doubt to give it an air of legitimacy. Yet after the first in a standard series of three hepatitis B shots was given, the effort was abandoned so that the team could move to bin Laden's wealthier community. This lapse in protocol proves that the best interests of the recipients were not the guiding principle of the effort—while not coincidently betraying the program for the sham it was."
Damn, they couldn't even be arsed to give them the full number of shots
