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
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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. Written on the bandana, in Urdu and English, were slogans indicating the wearer’s readiness for martyrdom. And stamped on the rifles were the words: “Property of US Govt. Manufactured in Columbia, South Carolina.”
The high-tech arsenal left behind by America is now turbocharging insurgencies in the border region, and its complicating efforts by the US and Pakistan to exploit its vast mineral riches.
More than 90% of the global output of refined rare earths, which are used to power everything from iPhones to electric vehicles, is controlled by China.
That near-monopoly on rare earths, and their processing, has become Beijing’s most potent tools in its trade war with the US, and Trump has set about trying to break it. In his first year in office the US president signed agreements with Australia, Cambodia and Thailand to future-proof US access to the critical minerals. And he promised to secure “more than you’ll know what to do with.”
Reading the room, Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir took an unusual prop on their first joint visit to the White House in September –– a chest containing a trove of rare earths they said had been dug from Pakistan’s soil.
Trump was charmed.
The following month he praised Munir in public –– naming him: “My favorite field marshal.”
Pakistan also piqued his interest by touting vast reserves of another metal: copper –– needed for the cables that transmit electricity to homes, the semiconductors behind AI development and other tech across the defense industry.
A “copper rush” is underway as the world digitizes and electrifies, say experts, with global demand expected to increase from 30 million tons a year, currently, to 50 million tons by 2050.
“Copper will fuel every part of our modern economy, and we’re at a structural shortage,” said Dr. Gracelin Baskaran, the director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
And that shortage makes the US less competitive for the processing of rare earth minerals, she said.
In December, the top US diplomat in Pakistan announced that the US Export-Import Bank (EXIM) had approved $1.25 billion in financing to support the mining of critical minerals at Reko Diq in the southwestern Balochistan province.
That site is home to the world’s largest undeveloped copper reserves, according to Canadian firm Barrick, which is leading efforts to develop it.
Many in Pakistan –– a country with an economy that has lurched from crisis to crisis, receiving 24 bailouts from the International Monetary Fund since 1958 –– are hoping a cash bonanza can be dug up
The United States “has lot to offer for the people and stability and prosperity of Pakistan,” Pakistan’s military spokesperson, Lt General Ahmed Sharif Choudhry told CNN.
The flurry of activity since Trump came to power has been noticed in Beijing, where officials insist their longstanding allies in Islamabad have given reassurances their business with America will not harm China’s interests.
Precious metals may be at the center of a great geopolitical struggle, but getting to them in Pakistan involves a bloody local battle.
In a brightly-lit, specially-designated hospital wing in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar dozens of wounded young men lie under scarlet blankets.
Medical machinery beeps, carers murmur softly. From another ward not too far away, the piercing screams of a patient are audible.
In the quiet sits 30-year-old Allah Uddin, whose legs were badly wounded a week before CNN met him, when Pakistani Taliban militants ambushed the convoy he was guarding in the same district as the Muhammad Khel Copper Mine.
It was his first experience of combat. Now, he is a double amputee with three children and a family to care for.
Describing the encounter in a quiet voice, he says what struck him was how good the guns his enemies had seemed to be.
“I don’t know where they were from but the weapons that they had… were different and better.”
The traditional militant arsenal in Pakistan was Soviet-era Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades, but now they’re armed with American weapons.
Colonel Bilal Saeed, Pakistani Military General Surgeon at the Peshawar hospital, told CNN that instead of treating patients with wounds from IED (improvised explosive device) blasts, they now “receiving patients with long range gunshot wounds, (or) sniper hits.”
The wounded used to arrive during the day, he said, but now they come after sunset because the insurgents not only have more advanced weapons, they have “night vision devices.”
The clash that took Uddin’s legs was far from an isolated incident. CNN spoke to around 10 other soldiers on the ward who had been wounded by bullets or blasts in recent weeks.
More than 1200 people including military and civilians were killed in militant attacks across the country in 2025, according to data shared by the Pakistani military. That’s double the number recorded in 2021, when the US retreated from Kabul and the Afghan Taliban returned to power. Multiple Pakistani military officials told CNN they are now fighting a “war” in the border regions.
Along the roads of South Waziristan, CNN saw multiple squads of heavily armed soldiers patrolling in trucks. The airfield at Wana, the biggest town, was thick with security personnel. But the road leading to North Waziristan –– where the Muhammad Khel Copper Mine is located –– was off-limits. It was too dangerous, Pakistani officials said.
Back in Peshawar, a stone’s throw from the hospital wing, some of the weapons wreaking new havoc along Pakistan’s mineral belt were laid out for CNN to see.
More than one hundred guns –– M-16s, M-4s, M249 machine guns and Remington-made sniper rifles sat together on tables. And all had imprints stating they were manufactured in the US.
Pakistani forces started seizing US-made weapons from Taliban fighters in 2022-2023, said said Muhammad Mubasher, a defense analyst with close ties to the military. Now they are seeing them “in almost every encounter that happens,” he said.
After taking down the serial numbers from three M-16s used in the Pakistani Taliban suicide attack on the cadet college, near Wana, CNN made a Freedom of Information Act request to the US military concerning how the weapons got to Afghanistan.
US Army Material Command, at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, provided data showing they each made different journeys from US weapons manufacturers and military installations to branches of the Afghan security forces, years before the US withdrawal in 2021.
The Pentagon declined to comment further when contact by CNN.
US-made M-16s and M-4 Carbines have also ended up in the hands of another insurgent group, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), according to Pakistani military sources.
For decades, the BLA has waged a separatist insurgency that seeks greater political autonomy and economic development in the strategically important and mineral-rich Balochistan region, where the Reko Diq mine and other copper and mineral reserves are located.
Asked whether Pakistan’s troops have guns of the same caliber as the US ones, Mubashar’s answer was short.
“No.”
Last weekend BLA militants launched a series of coordinated attacks which led to 33 people being killed according to the Pakistani military, deepening concerns about the feasibility of the United State’s mineral policy in the province and beyond. Pakistani authorities claim to have killed at least 133 militants in response.
The province’s chief minister Sarfaraz Bugti told CNN that “preliminary information indicated that several Afghan nationals were involved with them (BLA)” and that there was “ no doubt that most of the weapons used were US made that originated from Afghanistan.”
Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council, told CNN that Balochistan was both “ground zero for critical mineral opportunities, but it’s also ground zero when it comes to militant threats.”
After the US displaced the Taliban from Kabul in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it trained a new Afghan army – and gave it billions of dollars of weapons and military kit that it hoped would help the newly installed administration keep the Taliban out.
“You’re not planning for a collapse. You’re planning to continue to execute operations and prevent the collapse ,” said retired Air Force Colonel Scott Yeatmen, who was the top US advisor to the Afghan Air Force up until two months before the Taliban recaptured Kabul, following the spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s US-trained forces.
As US troops and personnel scrambled to withdraw in August 2021 they deserted a treasure trove of weapons and other military equipment.
Approximately 300,000 small arms US weapons were left behind, said John Sopko, who spent twelve years as the special inspector general for the US’s $148-billion Afghanistan reconstruction program.
Also left behind was electronic material including “communication stuff, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, mortars, cannons, heavy machine guns, surveillance equipment (and) night vision equipment,” Sopko told CNN.
Afghanistan is effectively now the world’s largest arms bazaar, he said. “If you want … to outfit your terrorist or insurgency organization, Afghanistan is the place to go.”
Islamabad has long accused Afghanistan of providing sanctuary to militant groups, something Taliban leaders have denied.
In a statement to CNN, the Afghan Taliban said all weapons left behind following the US withdrawal were under its “control and protection.”
Sopko says it’s “disturbing” how widely available these weapons are in the region.
All of Afghanistan’s neighbors, including Pakistan, Iran and even China, “should be concerned.”
President Trump has demanded the Afghan Taliban –– who share close links with the Pakistan Taliban across the border –– return the US weapons, but to no avail. CNN has reached out to the Pentagon for comment on whether it was currently in talks with the Afghan Taliban to retrieve those weapons.
His administration is making other moves too.
In August, it designated the BLA as a terror organization. That same month, US forces held a “Counterterrorism Dialogue” with their Pakistani counterparts to discuss joint efforts to combat the BLA, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), and Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) –– insurgent groups which have all long plagued Pakistani authorities.
In January, the two militaries completed joint training in Pakistan, which according to US Central Command, focused on combined infantry skills and tactics and counterterrorism operations.
Choudhry, Pakistan’s army spokesperson, was adamant Islamabad would do what it takes to secure mineral-rich areas and ensure its mining infrastructure is “world class.”
“We will resolve it,” he told CNN. “We have no other option.”
That likely means more battles in the arid mountains against a resurgent jihadist movement that, thanks to its US-made weapons, is able to outgun its opponents.
At the hospital ward in Peshawar, Uddin and the other wounded soldiers are left helpless and angry.
“I fired back at my enemies but could not reach them,” Uddin told CNN of the encounter that took both his legs.
“I am very angry, have you seen my condition?… I’ve seen my wounded companions around me, and it makes me even angrier.”
