Violence

PESHAWAR: Masked gunmen kidnapped a six-member polio vaccination team — a doctor, two local employees of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and three guards — in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) on Monday, an official said. Local administration official Niamat Ullah Khan said the team was seized some 300 kilometres southwest of Peshawar, in Ping village at the border of South Waziristan.

It was the third week of an uprising in Syria that would eventually evolve into a brutal civil war and already the wounded were showing up at the hospital in the Damascus suburb where 29-year-old Ahmed was doing rotations during his medical residency. Ahmed, who asked that only one part of his name be published because he is afraid of repercussions from Syria’s security agencies, had only just started examining a young man with bruises and a deep puncture wound on his right side when two armed security officials burst into the examining room barking questions.

Health workers in part of a troubled Pakistani tribal region Friday refused to participate in a polio vaccination campaign because of security threats, officials said. The three-day campaign in the Khyber tribal district is due to start on Saturday, almost three weeks after gunmen shot dead a worker while he was administering polio drops and vaccines to children in the town of Jamrud. Efforts to stamp out the crippling disease in Pakistan have been seriously hampered by militant attacks on health workers inoculating children.

The public health disaster in Syria has been a long time coming. In three years of violent conflict, 125,000 have been killed and millions displaced. The recent outbreak of polio has focused the world’s attention, and the international response is welcome. Yet this crisis was both predictable and preventable.

Report from the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (ACBAR): In the preparation for the upcoming elections of the spring 2014, the government of Afghanistan announced that some health facilities and schools had been designated as registration centers for the population and as polling stations. First and foremost ACBAR members acknowledge that the upcoming election process is a civilian political process, thus non-military, and therefore shouldn’t be targeted under International Humanitarian Law.