A roadside bomb struck a police vehicle escorting an anti-polio team in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on the event date of 2024-09-09, injuring 13 people in Wana, officials said. The attack again exposed the vulnerability of polio vaccination campaigns in a region that has repeatedly seen militants target both health workers and the security forces assigned to protect them.
According to Wana police spokesman Habib Islam, the blast hit near Karikot, a rugged village on the outskirts of Wana in South Waziristan tribal district. He said seven police officers and three anti-polio vaccinators were among the injured, with one of the wounded later described by a hospital official as critically hurt and referred to Dera Ismail Khan for treatment.
The report from Arab News said the injured were taken to Wana District Headquarters Hospital after the improvised explosive device detonated close to the convoy. Medical superintendent Hammad Mehmood said 13 wounded people arrived at the facility and most had minor injuries, except for one seriously wounded patient.
The attack came as Pakistan launched a vaccination drive across 115 districts, part of a broader campaign against a disease that remains endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That context matters: every large-scale polio campaign requires security support in some of the country's most unstable areas, and every such deployment carries the risk that armed groups will target the escorts rather than the health workers themselves.
The Arab News report said no group immediately claimed responsibility. That is common in attacks of this kind, where the target is often a state presence protecting public health work rather than a declared military formation.
South Waziristan has long been one of the most dangerous places for polio teams. The region borders Afghanistan and has been a stronghold for Pakistani Taliban elements and other militants. In recent months, the broader Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has seen further attacks on police, security forces and anti-polio teams, as well as kidnappings.
The attack also fits a grim pattern that has shaped Pakistan's anti-polio effort for years. Militants have repeatedly attacked vaccinators and their escorts, and opposition to inoculation was intensified by the CIA's use of a fake vaccination drive in 2011 to help locate Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. That episode has outlasted the original intelligence operation and continues to cast suspicion over public health work in parts of the country.
The result is a campaign in which every door-to-door visit can depend on armed protection. In South Waziristan, the administration had already begun vaccinating more than 70,000 children. The blast near Wana did not halt the broader national drive, but it showed again how fragile delivery can be when public health workers move through territory where security threats remain acute.
The immediate question after the attack was not only who planted the bomb, but whether the injured, especially the critically wounded patient, would recover and whether local teams would feel safe enough to continue work in the affected area. For Pakistani authorities, that balance between urgency and security remains central to efforts to eliminate polio from the country.
