Pakistan

A bomb exploded Monday near a group of polio vaccinators in Peshawar, killing at least two policemen, The New York Times reported. Since December, at least 20 polio workers have been killed in similar assaults. Such violence has threatened the global effort to stamp out the disease in the three countries where the virus is still endemic — Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

In Syria, doctors have fled in droves, fearful of adding to the casualties in the country’s bloody civil war. In Pakistan, vaccinators are gunned down by militants. In Bahrain, physicians who treat protesters are thrown in jail. Despite universally recognized international law protecting medical workers in conflict situations, increasingly, the people on the front line of health care are becoming targets. At a side event of the United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva today, speakers from Turkey, Bahrain, and Pakistan described attacks on healthcare workers for providing care to politically unpopular groups, or because the workers witnessed human rights violations. Other recent attacks have targeted vaccination teams and ambulances.

On July 3, 2013, a female health worker was killed in northwest Pakistan while conducting polio vaccinations; she was the latest to die in an on-going anti-vaccination campaign by militants. About three weeks earlier, on June 16, militants killed two male volunteers who were administering polio vaccines in northeast Pakistan.

Three suicide bombers stormed the office of the International Red Cross in Jalabad, Afghanistan earlier today and at least one guard has been killed. No one has so far claimed responsibility, but al-Qaeda has targeted the group in the past whereas the Taliban has not, according to the Wall Street Journal. The incident follows an attack by the Taliban last Friday on the Kabul headquarters of the International Organization for Migration.

The Taliban has ended its war on polio vaccination workers and admitted immunisation is the only way to protect children from the disease, its leadership said in a statement issued today. The announcement comes just weeks after the Afghan government launched a new campaign to immunise more than eight million children between six months and five years old throughout the country. It said it had trained 46,000 volunteers to conduct the campaign which is funded by the American aid agency USAID, the World Health Organisation and Unicef.