Go back to the next older Google image - a narrow bridge was present across the river. In the current image, the bridge is gone, probably because they are building a whole new bridge to accommodate the two-lane traffic.
It's a frickin road. Not a mine. It doesn't just connect two tiny villages, it appears to represent the main access to that whole region, providing access to many small villages.
If you follow that same road about four miles to the south, you can see that some of the roadcuts for the finished portions of the road are huge. This area appears to present quite the engineering challenge to build roads in. Here is one example:
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