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Emerald Miners

  • Moulana Latife, 45, prays on an outstretched jacket at the mouth of his mine in the mountains overlooking the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Thursday October 25, 2007. Latife has been working in the mines since he was 16 and fought with Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Russians in the 1980s and the Taliban after that. Most of the men at the times are deeply independent and conservative and trying to make a living from the back breaking work.
  • Muhammad Zaid, 19, uses a Swiss jack hammer to make holes in the rock to place explosive in the mountains over the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. Zaid who is recently married with a child has only been been working in the mines with his father for a few months, but having the strongest back means he works the bucking jackhammer. With his father's help Zaid found a promising vein in the rock and has started his own mine. Zaid's most successful find has been from an emerald found on the ground in the middle of the night after he found thieves plundering his mine.
  • Detonated dynamite throws rock and dust shooting out of an emerald mine on the rock face of the mountains above the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. Powdered explosive are shoved into holes that are drilled into the rock with a wood pole. A detonator is then inserted with a fuse and ignited. The miners blast rock as they follow promising veins looking for prized emeralds. The blast can be heard all the way to the village below and felt in the rocks of the mountain as miners work in adjacent mines.
  • Ahmad Lais Amin, 22, right, looks for signs of emerald in a handful of dirt he has excavated as, Aziz, a miner from a nearby cave holds the light and looks for signs of success in the slope of the Hindu Kush mountains towering over the Panjshir Valley near the village of Khenj, in Afghanistan on Thursday October 25, 2007. Miners sometimes drop in on promising excavations to snoop for better locations or to watch a big find.
  • Ahmad Jawead, 22, center, works with the mechanic of the mountain, Mohammad Israar, 46, left, and his hired hand Rahimullah, 27, as they try to start a Chinese made motor that creates compressed air for his air pressure operated rock drill in the mountains over the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Thursday October 25, 2007. The motor has a hand crank but they hope by heating up the carburetor they can help to prime it to start.
  • With excitement Ahmad Jawead, 22, shovels and picks his way through rock after having blasted the rock in his 60-meter deep mine looking for emeralds in the mountains over the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. Jawead has been working his mine for seven months straight looking for an emerald large enough to buy his way out of Afghanistan. After declaring his desire to leave the country and asking for help his family forbid him to leave. Now he blasts the rock hoping to fund his own way out of the country.
  • An emerald worker is perched on a rock next to his generator and compressor that operate his air pressure driven rock drill as the morning sun creeps over the Western face of the mountain above the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. The river of mine tailings can been seen in the mountain in the background. The miners' work is of environmental concern and the miners often also extract and dump valuable metals that exist around the emerald according to Mohamad Ibrahim, the Minister of the Mines and Industry Ministry in Kabul.
  • With the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj visible thousands of feet below, emerald miners reinforce the roof of their mountainside tent home in Panjshir province, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. The miners haul water from an abandoned mine that now is full of spring water but have to haul all other provisions from the village below. Gas stoves heat water for washing and gas lamps provide light for the mines and tents. Generators are reserved to operate jack hammers and air compressors for mining drills.
  • Having delivered a lunch of rice and lamb meat, Rahimullah, 27, scales the sheer rock face back to the stone cabin where he will clean up the pots and pans from the meal before returning to continue mining on mountains over the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007.
  • Ahmad Jawead, 22, left, Rahimullah, 27, center, and Burhan Amin, 26, right, share a breakfast of cream, bread, jam and tea as they make the day's bread on a gas burner in their stone one-room home in the mountains next to the mine they work above the Panjshir Valley village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. Ahmad Jawead and Burhan Amin are cousins and hire Rahimullah to help with the work of the mines. Teams of five to ten men, sometimes friends or family, work as partners in the mines.
  • An emerald miner uses a hand held mirror with an image of an model from India after washing himself in the morning in the emerald mines above Khenj, Afghanistan on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. The labor of the mines is conducted by young men who spend a week to seven months on the side of the mountains where no women work.
  • After setting off dynamite charges in the mine Rahimullah, 27, takes a smoke break as he waits for the dust to clear the shaft of a mineral mine on the slope of the Hindu Kush mountains over the Panjshir Valley near the village of Khenj, in Afghanistan on Thursday, October 25, 2007. Rahimullah is a hired hand who works for a team of young men who blast and drill holes in the mountains looking for emeralds and precious stones. The young men who work the mines were boys when the Taliban fell six years ago. The mines were a way to fund the jehad most of their father’s participated in but now the young men dig, hoping to find a rock large enough to feed their families or to give them enough money to escape the work of the mines.
  • Having returned to the village of Khenj with a week's worth of emeralds a buyers looks at a group of emeralds being sold for $3,500 in the village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Friday, October 26, 2007. Emeralds sold in the village usually go for double that price in town and several times that, depending on their quality, outside of the country.
  • Burhan Amin, 26, prays in the one-room stone house he shares with the rest of his team of miners on the slopes of the Hindu Kush mountains towering over the Panjshir Valley near the village of Khenj, in Afghanistan on Thursday October 25, 2007. Amin, 26, has a kidney ailment that does not allow him to work, brought on from years of battling the mountain for emeralds. Instead of manning the rock drill, Amin prepares the meals of rice, bread, lamb meat and tea for grime-covered miners. Even with this light duty, he sometimes feels too ill to work. “Most of the time I am sick. Those days when I am not feeling well, because there is the mountain and it is the work of the mountain. If we work from the morning till night, you will know how much you get tired,” Amin said.
  • Emerald buyers from Kabul, Hiatullah, left, and Gulalam, right, look at a pocketful of emeralds brought down the mountain in the village of Khenj, Afghanistan on Friday, October 26, 2007. Most miners keep their emeralds in a plastic package. Usually the partners in a mine will weigh, count, then wrap the emeralds they find, signing the wrapping to insure they all agree on what was found. Then the package is opened again when it reaches the village and is sold.
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