Taliban commander has banned polio vaccinations in North Waziristan in the tribal belt, days before 161,000 children were due to be vaccinated. He linked the ban to American drone strikes and fears that the CIA could use the polio campaign as cover for espionage, much as it did with Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who helped track Osama bin Laden.
The commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, said that polio vaccinations would be banned until the CIA stopped its drone campaign, which has been largely focused on North Waziristan.
Bahadur said the decision had been taken by the shura-e-mujahedeen, a council that unites the myriad jihadi factions in the area, including the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Punjabi extremists.
According to a report in the New York Times on Monday, the announcement, made over the weekend, is a blow to polio vaccination efforts in Pakistan, which is one of just three countries where the disease is still endemic and which accounted for 198 new cases last year — the highest rate in the world.
The tribal belt, which has suffered decades of poverty and conflict, is the largest reservoir of the disease. A UNICEF spokesman said health workers had intended to target 161,000 children under the age of 5 in a vaccination drive scheduled to begin on Wednesday.
That operation is now likely to be canceled. So far this year, Pakistan has recorded 22 new polio cases, compared with 52 in the same period last year.
The Taliban announcement will also likely rekindle controversy surrounding Dr. Afridi, who was recently convicted by a tribal court and sentenced to 33 years in prison. In March and April 2011, Dr. Afridi ran a vaccination campaign in Abbottabad that was designed to covertly determine whether Bin Laden lived in a house in the city. Dr. Afridi failed to obtain a DNA sample, a senior American official said, but did help establish that Bin Laden’s local protector, known as “the courier,” was inside the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
Dr. Afridi was arrested three weeks after American Navy SEALs raided the house on May 2, 2011, and killed the Al Qaeda leader. But the Abbottabad operation was not his only vaccination campaign. American officials say Dr. Afridi had been working with the C.I.A. for several years, at a time when he was leading polio vaccination efforts in Khyber Agency, a corner of the tribal belt that harbors a rare strain of the disease.
Western aid workers have sharply criticized the C.I.A. for recruiting medical personnel and have complained of harsh restrictions on their work imposed by suspicious Pakistani authorities. American officials say Dr. Afridi was targeting a mutual enemy of Pakistan and the United States. The Taliban statement suggests that suspicion about health workers has spread to militant groups, which are prepared to use the issue for propaganda purposes.
Despite the challenges of North Waziristan, a hub of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, Unicef says that 143,000 of the area’s 161,000 children under 5 were reached by the last round of vaccinations from June 4 to 6.
Dr. Muhammad Sadiq, the surgeon general for North Waziristan, said he had already received Taliban orders to cancel the vaccination drive planned for Wednesday and Thursday. “Under these circumstances we cannot continue,” he said in a telephone interview.
Din Muhammad, a journalist based in neighboring South Waziristan tribal agency, said the main Taliban commander there, Mullah Nazir, was also planning to block polio vaccination efforts.
