Located in a mountainous region 40 kilometers southeast of the capital, Mes Aynak is a hill topped by a 4500-square-meter monastery. Although the site was spotted by archaeologists in the 1960s, it was never excavated. During the late 1990s, the hill was home to an al-Qaida training camp, according to the 2004 report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. In recent years, looters have damaged much of the monastery complex in the search for antiquities, says Nader Rassouli, director of Afghanistan's National Institute of Archaeology in Kabul, which is also participating in the current excavations.
Two millennia ago, this region served as a critical conduit in the spread of Buddhism to Central Asia and China, says T. Richard Blurton, an archaeologist and curator at London's British Museum who has excavated in Afghanistan. He says Mes Aynak could provide new data on both the origin and demise of the religion here.
BALL Warwick (2018), Archaeological gazetteer of Afghanistan, revised edition, Oxford
WIKIPEDIA - Mes Aynak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mes_Aynak)
KLIMBURG-SALTER Deborah (2018), Contextualizing Mes Aynak, Afghanistan (https://www.academia.edu/37789858/Contextualizing_Mes_Aynak)
HYPOTHESES (20121), From Mining Site to Mining City: the Case of Mes Aynak, Afghanistan (https://urbrel.hypotheses.org/1349)