About 40 kilometers south of Kaboul, lost in the immensity of enormous rocky peaks, hides a great thousand-year-old Buddhist city at risk of disappearing forever: Mes Aynak. The immense archaeological site includes ruins over 2,000 years old spread over 1,000 hectares and some 400 Buddhist statues. Since 2007, Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC), a Chinese copper extraction giant, has been seeking to open a large open-pit mine located a few meters from the deposit and for which it signed a contract of more than 30 years for a whopping 3 billion dollars with the Afghan government. The extraction process includes the collapse of rocks using explosives for later collection, in addition to being one of the most polluting metallurgical industries.
The site was discovered in 1960 by a French geologist, but excavation began 50 years later. Since its discovery, the area has been abandoned to its fate, even hosting a large Al-Qaeda training camp in the 1990s. In 2010, the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan began to study the complex and found a monastic building with a chapel vaulted ceiling, wall paintings, coins, pieces of glass and statues from between the 1st and 5th centuries. Manuscripts have also been discovered that would account for the presence of Alexander the Great's troops in the area.
The arrival of the MCC in 2007 caused great concern in the international community, which considered that mining exploitation would pose a danger to the preservation and conservation of the deposit. So much so, that the mining giant had to authorize archaeological excavations prior to the start of copper extraction. To this day and more than 15 years later, the company has still not set foot in the area, despite pressure from Beijing, which has not found any agreement with the Afghan government so far. In August 2021, the return to government of the Taliban reopened negotiations, forced to seek new sources of financing to compensate for the blockade of international aid.
Bastien Varoutsikos, an archaeologist at the French company Iconem, who has been working for several years digitizing the objects found at the site, explained to AFP: "In 2010, it was the largest archaeological project in the world." MCC had granted 3 years to the excavations, which were concentrated in the area that would be directly affected by the opening of the mine. "We would have needed much more time to study the entire area," added the archaeologist. In these 15 years, more than a thousand objects have been rescued and transferred to the Kaboul Museum or to appropriate facilities near the site.
The Taliban expect to make more than $300 million annually from the mining of Aynak Month. Esmatullah Burhan, Afghan spokesman for the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum has assured: "80% of the contract has already been finalized, now only the last technical details are missing", adding that the project has to start as soon as possible. The government is demanding that the Chinese company build a power plant to power part of Kaboul and a railway to the Pakistani border in the south of the country. If the MCC manages to finalize details with Afghanistan, the largest Buddhist archaeological site in the world will be lost.
