HERAT, Afghanistan - Scores of factories shut up shop in AfghanistanÂ’s western city of Herat on Monday as workers joined doctors and nurses in a strike to demand better security, representatives said. About 200 health workers in the city stopped working Saturday complaining of a rise in criminality, including kidnappings, as well as attacks linked to an insurgency led by the extremist Taliban movement.
Workers at around 250 small factories at the city’s main industrial park joined them on Monday, said the chairman of the city’s industrial union, Toryalai Ghawsi. “We don’t have security in this industrial park. Unless the security to ensure our safety is provided, we will not open,” he said.
Doctors were meanwhile refusing to go to hospitals and private clinics were closed, expect for emergency cases, said Sayed Hassan Farid, spokesman for the city’s doctors’ union. “Insecurity, kidnapping and terror have increased in Herat and no one is taking this seriously,” he told AFP. “We want the central government to provide us security.”
The governor of Herat province, which adjoins Iran, said police were doing what they could but were under-resourced. “We have 2,500 police for a city of three million people. That’s not enough,” governor Sayed Hussein Anwari said. |