Gunmen attacked two females distributing polio vaccinations outside of the Pakistani city of Peshawar on Tuesday, killing one and wounding the other, only the latest incident in a pattern of violence that was rare until the last several years.
While no group has yet claimed responsibility, violence of this type is becoming a trend in countries with strong Islamist military presences — 9 aid workers were killed in Nigeria in February and 7 in Pakistan in January.
The two women had been vaccinating children using oral drops, and were by themselves when they were attacked, The New York Times reported. The local government often sends police to protect vaccination teams, but the women asked not to be accompanied.
Javed Marwat, Peshawar deputy city commissioner, hypothesized that the women preferred to work alone because they did not wish to “become a target.”
The surviving worker was being treated in a hospital in Peshawar, several miles north of the village where the attack took place, said the Los Angeles Times. A police official there said that no arrests had been made.
Attacks on civilians, aid workers, and even women are nothing new in the region. Only a week before, gunmen killed a solider protecting a group doing vaccinations, also in northwest Pakistan.
On New Year’s day of this year, militants killed six females and one male doctor who had been vaccinating in a rural area closest to the capital of Islamabad. In that attack, the gunmen removed a child traveling with the adults from the vehicle, killed the seven workers, and then placed the child back in the car, a detail first reported by the Daily Mail.
Islamist militants are also firmly embedded in regions of Nigeria, and an aid crew of 9 workers were assassinated there in early February.
Such attacks were uncommon until the last several years. Possible causes for the surge in assaults include the U.S. military’s use of a mole posing as a doctor in their reconnaissance of Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and extremist paranoia that vaccinations are a Western plot to sterilize Muslim men.