Buried for Gold: Five Workers Killed as Another Afghan Mine Collapses

In the Shah Mastan area of Cha Ab district, in Afghanistan's northern Takhar province, the earth gave way on Saturday and five men never came back up. Local officials confirmed the collapse of a gold mine and the deaths of five workers. The provincial police spokesman, Qari Naqibullah Masroor, offered no further details. In Afghanistan's artisanal mines, there rarely are any. The pattern is as familiar as it is grim. In the country's remote mountain regions, villages hollowed out by poverty send their men down into hand-dug shafts with basic tools and no safety rules whatsoever. There is no engineering supervision, no modern machinery, no regulation worth the name. Collapses are not accidents in any meaningful sense. They are the predictable output of a system that treats workers' lives as disposable. The ledger of the dead keeps growing. Earlier this year, two gold mine accidents in Badakhshan province killed five people each. In 2019, a mine collapse in Kohistan district killed 30 workers, among them children. Afghanistan is a country rich in minerals, and that wealth has become a curse for the poor who dig it with their hands. Poverty is the engine of this trade. In districts like Cha Ab, where farming barely sustains a family, a rumour of gold in the hills is enough to send men underground with little more than picks and rope. Whatever gold they find passes through layers of middlemen; the men who risk their lives see the smallest share. The wealth beneath Afghanistan's soil has enriched warlords and traders for decades. It has rarely enriched the digger. The international community has documented this economy for years, yet on the ground nothing changes. There is no inspectorate worth the name, no requirement for shoring or ventilation, no registry of who is digging where. When a shaft collapses, the count of the dead depends on whoever happens to be nearby to report it. Saturday's five are the ones we know about. Experts blame the absence of regulation, safety equipment and technical oversight. Small-scale private mining operations run with almost no monitoring. And for the families of the dead, there is not even the thin comfort of compensation: officials announced nothing. Five workers went underground on Saturday morning to pull gold from the earth. They did not come home. Until Afghanistan's mines are regulated, equipped and supervised, the next collapse is not a question of if. It is a question of when.