SWABI: Two female polio workers gunned down by militants in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province on Wednesday, had been carrying out their duties unassisted by security personnel due to a shortage in Swabi district’s police force, according to police officials.
Shakeela, 41, and Ghuncha, 35, were returning to the Basic Health Unit (BHU) in Parmolai, to the northwest of Swabi city, after giving polio vaccinations to children in a nearby settlement of houses along the outskirts of the village. They were targeted by two unidentified motorcycle riders near the BHU. Shakeela was shot four times in the chest and once in the head. She died instantly, less than 300 meters from her home.
Ghuncha, a mother of four, was shot with four bullets and died seven hours after the incident on the operating table of a Peshawar hospital.
“The district’s requirement for polio duty is 2,500 policemen and our total strength is just 1,500. Due to a shortage of police personnel, security is given on priority to the high-risk areas,” District Police Officer (DPO) Swabi, Imran Shahid, told Arab News.
More than 70 polio workers and over 30 security personnel guarding the polio teams have been killed in targeted attacks since December 2012, with hard-line clerics and militants in some areas claiming the vaccine is a foreign ploy to sterilize Muslim children and that campaign workers are Western spies.
Special police force personnel Shah Zaman was on security duty with the polio vaccinating team in Swabi district himself when he received a call about the militant attack on his wife Shakeela, who was on duty hardly 10 km away in an area considered ‘low-risk’ for polio workers.
The union council of Parmolai had a lowered risk assessment due to the dearth of any attacks in recent years.
“The people in Parmolai are very supportive of the polio vaccinations and the female health workers belonging to the village felt safe,” Shahid told Arab News.
However, a majority of targeted attacks against polio teams take place in KP, where resistance against the vaccination remains high due to propaganda and a lingering mistrust from the 2011 CIA-backed fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad in the US hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
Shah Zaman told Arab News that he had accepted the ironic and tragic death of his wife, while he had himself been guarding polio vaccinators just a few miles away from her.
“It hurts because I was protecting a polio team myself when my wife was targeted for trying to protect children from the poliovirus. Security should be provided to every polio team even if an area is low-risk or if the polio teams don’t request security,” Zaman said.
According to KP health department data in December 2019, at least 1,089,087 parents refused polio vaccinations to their children, amid incidents of propaganda like last year’s rumored ‘reaction’ to polio drops in Mashukhkel, along the outskirts of Peshawar. Over 25,000 kids were rushed to different hospitals in the area as misinformed parents feared for their wellbeing after the vaccination was administered.
Shah Wali Khan, President of the Bajaur Welfare Association in the southern city of Karachi is a strong supporter of vaccination campaigns in his area.
“There were 109 refusing families from Bajaur and almost all of them cited the Mashukhkel incident as their reason for refusing vaccines. After counseling, 85 families agreed to vaccinate their children,” Khan told Arab News.
According to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria are the last three countries in the world where poliovirus still remains a problem. In 2019, 144 cases of polio were reported in Pakistan.