Three polio vaccination workers have been abducted by unidentified armed men in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Tank district, police said on Tuesday, in the latest attack on the health workers carrying out Pakistan's nationwide immunisation campaign.
The gunmen took the three workers from the Sorghar area of Tank district to an undisclosed location, the district administration confirmed. The abducted workers were identified as Mir Janan, Ikram and Khanzala. No group has claimed responsibility for the abduction, and there was no immediate word on the condition of the three men or on any demand from their captors.
The abduction was reported by the Press Trust of India wire and carried by The Hindu, The Week and the Daily Excelsior on Tuesday. It comes in the middle of a nationwide polio vaccination drive aiming to reach nearly 24 million children across 97 high-risk districts, a campaign that has been repeatedly disrupted by violence against the vaccinators and the police officers who guard them.
Tank has become one of the most dangerous districts in the country for polio workers. Just over a week ago, on 2 November, four polio workers were abducted by unidentified gunmen in the same district after being subjected to gunfire in the village of Jious in the Sheikh Attar union council. Police launched an investigation, but the whereabouts of those four workers remain unknown. A day later, on Monday, three polio officials were kidnapped from the Umarkot area of Tank, in the limits of Malazai police station — District Surveillance Officer Dr Ihsanullah, Union Council Communication Support Officer Hikmatullah and Union Council Polio Officer Abdullah were taken while monitoring the campaign, and a heavy police contingent cordoned off the area to search for them.
The violence has not been confined to Tank. On Tuesday 3 November, gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead two police officers in Mohmand district as they travelled to join a polio vaccination team for security duty, and wounded a third. The officers, Constables Zahoor Khan and Arbai Khan, were attacked near the Hashim Kor police checkpost in the Pindiali tehsil. The same week, a polio campaign supervisor, Jalil Khan, was abducted from the Chapri area of Jamrud in Khyber district, and two members of a vaccination team were abducted in the Azam Warsak area of Lower South Waziristan before being released.
The pattern is a familiar and grim one. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where wild poliovirus remains endemic, and the vaccinators who go door to door are among the most exposed public servants in the country. Militant groups, above all the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, have repeatedly targeted polio drives, falsely claiming that vaccination is part of a Western conspiracy to sterilise children. Health workers have been killed, kidnapped and threatened for years, and the police escorts assigned to protect them have become targets in their own right.
The latest incidents have drawn condemnation from the top of the provincial and federal government. After the abduction of the four Tank workers last week, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi took notice and directed the authorities to take immediate and effective measures for their safe recovery. President Asif Ali Zardari described the shooting of the two Mohmand policemen as extremely regrettable and condemnable, and Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi called that attack intolerable and offered condolences to the families of the killed officers.
The campaign itself is operating under extraordinary pressure. Pakistan confirmed its eighth polio case of the year on 2 November, a 13-month-old girl from Khyber district, according to the National Emergency Operations Centre for Polio Eradication. Each case is a reminder of how much is at stake: every missed child is a chance for the virus to keep circulating, and every attack on a team makes the next round of vaccinations harder to staff and to secure.
For the families of Mir Janan, Ikram and Khanzala, the immediate question is whether the three men will come home. In previous abductions in the region, some workers have been released after negotiations involving tribal elders and the district administration, while others have remained missing for far longer. The district administration has confirmed the abduction but has not yet said publicly what steps are being taken to trace the men.
What happens next will depend on whether the authorities can secure the workers' release quickly and whether the campaign can continue in Tank without further attacks. Health officials have repeatedly warned that repeated disruptions in the same districts leave pockets of unvaccinated children, and that is exactly how the virus survives. The security forces, meanwhile, face the same dilemma they have faced for years: how to protect thousands of small, mobile vaccination teams spread across some of the most volatile districts in the country.
For now, the facts are stark: three more health workers taken, a campaign under strain, and a province where the people trying to protect children from a crippling disease have themselves become targets. The hope in Tank, as after every such incident, is that the three men are found safe — and that the campaign they were serving can go on.
