KABUL, Afghanistan – Three health workers, all women working for the government’s polio vaccination campaign, were shot dead Tuesday in Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan, local officials said just weeks after three television women were killed in the same city .
The women, all in their twenties, were working in the busy city near the border with Pakistan when they were gunned down in two separate attacks.
Semin, 24, and Basira, 20, who like many Afghans had only one name, were shot dead by two armed men when they entered a house in Jalalabad to vaccinate the children living there, the governor’s office said.
The two walked door-to-door in the city, a practice that the Taliban have banned in areas under their control in the past.
It was Semin’s first vaccination campaign; said Ahmad Faisal Nizami, the victim’s cousin. She was recently married and trained as a teacher.
Negina, 24, who was in charge of the polio vaccination campaign that began in Afghanistan on Monday, was shot dead elsewhere in the city about an hour later.
No group immediately took responsibility for the murders.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied any involvement in the incident in a WhatsApp message.
Afghanistan, which recorded 56 cases of polio in 2020 according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, is one of two countries where the disease has not been eradicated, trailing Pakistan.
Around the same time as Tuesday’s shooting, there was an explosion at the city’s regional hospital, officials said outside the compound where the vaccines are stored. There were no victims, but the windows were broken.
The recent killings – part of a wave of targeted attacks that often singled out women, journalists, professionals, activists and doctors – came at a difficult moment for Afghanistan as the Taliban have made steady military gains and those considered to be with the Afghans work together, relentlessly attack government. In addition, the remnants of the Islamic state operating in the region have focused on carrying out less large-scale bombings and smaller but targeted attacks.
The United States has yet to say definitively whether it will meet the May 1 withdrawal deadline for all American forces. This emerges from an agreement the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in February 2020.
“My niece Basira was a poor girl,” said Haji Moqbel Ahmad, a tribal elder in Jalalabad, who added that the woman had not previously been threatened. “She was shot while she was doing her job.”
A vaccination worker since her youth, Basira had been signed up for a five-day vaccination campaign for which she would receive less than $ 30.
The month began with the murder of three women who worked for a television station in Jalalabad. A TV and radio presenter from the same station was shot in the same way in December. The Islamic State took responsibility for both incidents.
The New York Times documented the deaths of at least 136 civilians and 168 security personnel in such targeted killings in 2020, more than in almost any other year of the war. Until 2021 there has been no reprieve from the same type of violence.
The Taliban are exerting increasing pressure on the government and society and claiming dominance as stuttering, intermittent negotiations are taking place to resolve the Afghan conflict.
Jalalabad is one of the hardest hit cities. One day after the murders of television workers, a doctor was killed there by a roadside bomb.
Ross Wilson, the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in Kabul, condemned the murders Tuesday.
“Such attacks are a direct violation of Afghans’ dream of building better lives for their children,” Wilson wrote on Twitter. “My deepest condolences to the families of the victims as we seek justice,” he wrote. “The attack on vaccines is as heartless as it is inexplicable.”
Humanitarian aid organizations were also outraged. Henrietta Fore, Managing Director of Unicef, issued a statement calling victims “courageous vaccines that have been at the forefront of efforts to fight the spread of polio and protect the children of Afghanistan from this disabled disease”.
Zabihullah Ghazi reported from Jalalabad and Fahim Abed from Kabul, Afghanistan.
