At least five Pakistani police officers were killed, and 27 people were injured in a blast that targeted a police vehicle escorting a polio vaccination team in the Bajaur district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan on Monday, January 8.
According to reports from Pakistani media, the blast occurred in the early morning in Mamund, a town in Bajaur district, located approximately 14 kilometers from Afghanistan. This region has experienced increased attacks since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021.
“A police truck transporting around 25 policemen for anti-polio campaign duties was targeted by an IED (improvised explosive device),” Anwar ul Haq, a Pakistani official in Bajaur district, told reporters.
According to reports, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the blast. Muhammad Khorasani, a TTP spokesperson, stated, ” A police mobile party was targeted with a mine blast in which six policemen were killed and 10 others severely wounded.”
Following the Taliban’s return to power, Pakistan experienced a dramatic surge in militant attacks, particularly in its border regions with Afghanistan. According to a report published by the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, there has been a staggering 65% surge in terrorism-related fatalities in Pakistan during the year 2023. The major contributors to this violence were identified as TTP, IS-K, and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). According to the report, these three groups carried out over 78 percent of the total terrorist attacks in 2023, which contributed to over 82 percent of terrorism-related deaths.
Pakistan has initiated a countrywide door-to-door polio vaccination campaign aimed at immunizing children under the age of five. Currently, Pakistan and Afghanistan remain the only countries globally where the disease remains endemic. This is even though vaccines for the disease have been around for decades now.
As per the World Health Organization (WHO), Pakistan continues to report new cases of active poliovirus in its northwestern regions bordering Afghanistan. Among the reported cases in 2023, four out of six polio infections were identified in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province that shares a border with Afghanistan.
The killing of polio workers in Pakistan and Afghanistan is an issue of grave concern. There is a lack of awareness of the dangers of polio, and false religious beliefs are quite common in northern areas of Pakistan, especially in cities near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. A majority of the population is not familiar with the consequences and transmission dynamics of poliovirus. The growing frequency of terrorist attacks targeting polio vaccinators has posed significant challenges to its eradication. Over the past decade, security personnel and Pakistani police accompanying polio workers have also become victims of terrorist attacks.
Extremists, including the TTP, have killed dozens of polio vaccination workers and their security escorts in the past. In 2022, a suicide bomber from the TTP attacked a police escort accompanying a polio vaccination team in southwestern Pakistan, killing four people and wounding more than 30. One year before that, the militant group shot and killed one Pakistani police officer and injured another while they were escorting polio vaccinators in the region. The deadliest incidents occurred in December 2012, when the militant group executed a string of attacks in Karachi, Peshawar, Charsadda, and Nowshera. The attacks disrupted a three-day national polio vaccination campaign, resulting in the killing of at least nine anti-polio health workers, including five female volunteers.
