Taliban officials at a ceremony on Thursday announced the start of work on the second phase of the Jabal Siraj cement factory, saying it will help create thousands of jobs and is part of efforts to expand one of the country’s oldest industrial plants.
At a ceremony in Parwan province, north of Kabul, the Taliban’s deputy chief Abdul Salam Hanafi said the project would be financed and implemented by the National Development Corporation, a state-run company under Taliban control.
Hanafi said the new facility would have the capacity to produce 5,000 tons of cement every 24 hours.
Taliban have not disclosed the project’s budget, provided a construction timeline or said when production is expected to begin.
Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy chief minister for economic affairs, portrayed the project as part of a broader effort to shift Afghanistan’s economy away from its heavy dependence on imports.
Citing Afghanistan’s geographic position, natural resources and labor force, Baradar said the Taliban administration was taking steps to transform the country’s economy from one dependent on imports into one based increasingly on domestic production and exports.
The Jabal Siraj cement factory has a history stretching back nearly seven decades.
The plant began operations in 1958 after an initial investment of 40 million afghanis. Located in Jabal Siraj district of Parwan province, north of Kabul, it was among Afghanistan’s early state industrial projects.
But the factory’s history has been marked by repeated shutdowns and attempts at rehabilitation. Years of conflict, aging machinery, weak infrastructure and limited investment disrupted production, and successive Afghan governments explored plans to restore or expand the plant.
In 2018, the former government’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum announced plans to put the construction of a second phase out to tender. At the time, officials envisioned an investment of about $170 million and annual production capacity of one million tons of cement.
That plan was not completed before the collapse of the former government in August 2021.
Taliban later pursued a separate investment agreement for the factory. In 2023, a contract for the first phase of the Jabal Siraj cement project was signed with a Qatari company, with a reported investment of $220 million.
Taliban have not explained how the newly announced second phase, to be implemented by the National Development Corporation, relates operationally or financially to the earlier agreement with the Qatari company.
They have also not provided details on whether the announced capacity of 5,000 tons a day refers entirely to the second phase or to the projected capacity of the expanded factory as a whole.
At full production throughout the year, a daily capacity of 5,000 tons would amount to roughly 1.8 million tons annually.
