The US wants in on Pakistan’s critical minerals bonanza. But it’s located on militant territory - and they’re armed with stolen US weapons

US-made M-16s, M-4s, M249 machine guns are falling into the hands of militants. Upgrade to watch the full report.

South Waziristan, Pakistan —

In the sienna-colored curves of Pakistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, one of the most rugged and lawless regions in the world, a cavernous, grooved crater gouged out from a hillside shines in the winter sun, just ten miles from the border with Afghanistan.

Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of copper, 22,000 tons, was last year dug out of this crater –– the Muhammad Khel Copper Mine –– and hauled off to China; a nation with a seemingly insatiable appetite for metals and minerals.

In a neighboring province lies another copper mine that Pakistan says can yield almost ten times as much, equivalent to a fifth of the copper America uses every year. The prospect is so appealing to a Washington administration also hungry for resources that it has put up more than a billion dollars to get things moving.

Pakistan says there is much more wealth beneath its soil –– an estimated $8 trillion in copper, lithium, cobalt, gold, antimony and other critical minerals. And that claim has oiled an unlikely friendship with US President Donald Trump, who has put mineral acquisition at the heart of US foreign policy.

But the treasure Pakistan claims to be sitting on is located in border areas wracked by decades-long jihadist insurgencies, that have grown more widespread and deadly since the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 left behind a cornucopia of hastily abandoned weaponry.

On an exclusive trip to some of Pakistan’s most dangerous areas, a CNN team was shown hundreds of US-made rifles, machine guns and sniper rifles –– all leftovers from Washington’s war next door, and all seized from a new breed of jihadists and insurgents.

Around 50 miles from the Muhammad Khel Copper Mine near the western town of Wana, outside a military cadet college building recently hit by a Pakistani Taliban suicide attack, a colonel laid out a blood-soaked bandana and three M-16 rifles recovered from the militants.