A group of potato farmers sat cross-legged in a velvet-carpeted madrassa, pensively mulling assembling an armed militia to guard Afghanistan's largest iron-ore reserve buried in jagged Hindu Kush ridges flanking their village.
Afghanistan's vast untapped natural resources, valued at more than USD 1 trillion, are seen as the war-battered country's ticket to a self-reliant future, a possible trump card that could jumpstart the lagging economy as foreign aid ebbs.
But the lucrative sector - already plagued by rampant corruption, insurgent violence and a lack of regulation which are all deterring international miners - also threatens to fuel conflict and push Afghanistan deeper into turmoil.
"We are sitting on a fortune which could create cars and planes for the world, and jobs and schools for local people," said Mohammad Reza, 53, twirling his prayer beads.
"But this treasure could fall in the wrong hands if militants start infiltrating into Hajigak," added the father-of-six, sitting among robed and turbaned farmers in the library of the seminary.
Hajigak, a patchwork of boulder-strewn ridges and wildflower meadows in central Bamiyan province, sits atop an estimated 1.8 billion tonnes of iron-ore - one of the world's biggest such untapped deposits.
Barring occasional incursions by armed nomadic tribesman, this remote region dominated by minority ethnic Hazaras enjoys relative tranquility despite being hemmed in by insurgency-wracked provinces.
But mining in the area, farmers fear, would inevitably enflame violence that has engulfed other areas of Afghanistan endowed with mineral wealth.
Insurgents, warlords and militias have made murderous incursions into most other areas rich in deposits of iron, gold, copper and precious stones, including the eastern provinces of Logar and Ghazni and the northern badlands of Badakhshan.
At least 1,200 of Hajigak's farmers, many of them mujahideen fighters during the civil war in the 1990s, have volunteered to mobilise a militia as a bulwark against intruders and illegal excavators.
Informal militias against a 14-year Taliban insurgency are becoming increasingly common across rural Afghanistan, although those dedicated to protection of mining sites are rare. President Ashraf Ghani recently quipped that Afghanistan's mining resources were enough to feed the country for 400 years.
An Indian consortium and a Canadian company which won rights to develop the Hajigak mines in 2011 are yet to begin work at the site.
