Rotimi Morgan/
The United States has dropped its largest non-nuclear weapon targeting ISIS’s network of caves and tunnels in eastern Afghanistan.
U.S. forces used a GPS-guided GBU-43 bomb, which is 30 feet long and weighs a staggering 21,600 pounds.
A crater left by the blast is believed to be more than 300 meters wide after it exploded six feet above the ground. Anyone at the blast site was vaporized.
It has been described as the “Mother Of All Bombs” – a play on the ‘MOAB’ acronym, which stands for “Massive Ordnance Air Burst.”
The move marks the fulfilment of a 17-month-old campaign promise President Donald Trump delivered in Iowa, when he scoffed at ISIS terror forces and said he “would bomb the s**t out of them” if he became president.
The explosion will also send a saber-rattling message to North Korea and Iran that rogue states’ nuclear-weapons ambitions could be met with brute force.
White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters that MOAB is “a large, powerful and accurately delivered weapon” whose use was intended to collapse underground spaces used by ISIS terrorists to move freely and attack U.S. and allied troops.
“The United States takes the fight against ISIS seriously, and in order to defeat the group we must deny them operational space – which we did,” Spicer said.
He referred reporters’ questions to the Pentagon and ignored a shouted question about whether Trump was aware the bomb had been dropped.
Trump said during a November 2015 campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa that ISIS was “making a tremendous amount of money” because of “certain areas of oil that they took away” after the Obama administration withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“They have some in Syria, some in Iraq. I would bomb the s**t out of them,” he said to wild cheers. “I would just bomb those suckers. That’s right. I’d blow up the pipes. … I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left.”
A specialized MC-130 ‘Hercules’ cargo aircraft released the weapon at 7:00 p.m. local time.
It was too big to drop from a traditional bomb-bay door or release from an aircraft wing, so “we kicked it out the back door,” a U.S. official told Fox News.
The weapon’s sheer power produces a blast that can be felt miles away, largely because of its construction.
Engineers used an unusually thin aluminum skin to encase MOAB’s payload, in order to avoid a thicker steel frame interfering with the impact on a target.
The U.S. fast-tracked the MOAB in 2003 for use in Operation Iraqi Freedom, but the Defence Department later decided that the enemy provided too little resistance to justify its deployment.
It was available to the Obama administration throughout the former president’s entire two terms, but he never deployed it in combat.
Its first practical test was carried out on March 11, 2003 at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
Pentagon spokesman, Adam Stump, said it was the first ever combat use of the bomb, which contains 11 tons of explosives.
Stump said the bomb was dropped on a cave complex believed to be used by ISIS fighters in the Achin district of Nangarhar province, very close to the border with Pakistan.
Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement about ISIS that “as their losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their Defence”.
“This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against (ISIS).”