January 2016 Quetta suicide bombing

On 13 January 2016, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device near vehicles carrying security personnel close to a polio vaccination centre in a town near Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan. The attack killed at least 15 people, including 13 policemen and one soldier, and wounded another 25 people. Two militant organizations, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and Jaishul Islam, both claimed responsibility for the bombing.

The attack occurred within the broader context of sustained militant opposition to polio vaccination campaigns in Pakistan. Vaccination teams and the security personnel assigned to protect them have repeatedly been targeted by militant groups, who have propagated claims that vaccination campaigns serve as cover for intelligence-gathering activities. This suspicion was heightened following the 2011 use of a fake vaccination campaign by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to help locate Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, an operation that is widely cited as having deepened public distrust of vaccination programs in parts of Pakistan.

Since 2012, at least 70 polio workers have been killed in Pakistan, with many attacks claimed by the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan). The January 2016 Quetta bombing falls within this pattern of violence directed at the security apparatus supporting polio eradication efforts in Balochistan, a province that has continued to report a significant share of Pakistan's wild poliovirus cases in subsequent years. Similar attacks have continued in the years since, including a November 2022 suicide bombing of a police truck in Quetta that killed three people and injured 27, in which the police were reported to have been travelling to protect polio vaccinators, and a September 2024 attack in which a polio worker and a policeman were killed by a gunman affiliated with Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.