The U.S. has dropped one if its largest non-nuclear bombs on a tunnel complex in Afghanistan, the U.S. military said.
The use of the GBU-43/B is a first for the battlefield, and was dropped in Nangarhar province on Thursday. The target was a tunnel complex in Achin district being used by the ISIS-Khorasan group.
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Known as the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, the bomb has been nicknamed “Mother of All Bombs.” Developed in 2003, the GPS-guided bomb has been tested but never used against an enemy. The bomb is 30-feet long and weighs 21,600 pounds. It’s being referred to as the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. inventory, but the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator is larger, at 30,000 pounds, at least based on weight.
“As ISIS-K’s losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson, commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, said in a statement. “This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against ISIS-K.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday that the bomb was used to deny the group “operational space.”
“We targeted a system of tunnels and caves that ISIS fighters used to move around freely, making it easier for them to target U.S. military advisers and Afghan forces in the area,” he said. “The United States takes the fight against ISIS very seriously. And in order to defeat the group, we must deny them operational space, which we did.”
On Saturday, Staff Sgt. Mark R. De Alencar was killed in Nangarhar province while fighting the ISIS-Khorasan group. ISIS-Khorasan is an ISIS affiliate that operates in Afghanistan. Nangarhar province, on the eastern border near Pakistan, has been a base of operations for ISIS since 2015, the military said.
“Daesh [ISIS] seek to use the area to train, equip, disseminate propaganda, and expand their control over innocent Afghans,” U.S. Forces-Afghanistan said in September.
The military statement said the bomb was dropped from “a U.S. aircraft,” and the strike “was designed to minimize the risk to Afghan and U.S. Forces conducting clearing operations in the area while maximizing the destruction of ISIS-K fighters and facilities.”
In 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the MOAB was developed to be a deterrent to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
“The goal is to have the pressure be so great that Saddam Hussein cooperates,” he said. “Short of that — an unwillingness to cooperate — the goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition so clear and so obvious that there is an enormous disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight against the coalition.”
According to an Air Force news story from 2008, when the MOAB was tested on March 11, 2003, a mushroom cloud was visible from 20 miles away.
