Kabul – 36 militants were killed after the US dropped a massive bomb on an Islamic State cave complex in Achin district of Nangarhar province Thursday night, the Afghan defence ministry said on Friday.
The ministry said no civilian casualties were inflicted in the bombing, but an important Islamic State command centre had been completely destroyed along with loads of light and heavy weapons.
A 300-metre-long tunnel was destroyed, the ministry said further.
The GBU-43 bomb, which goes by the nickname MOAB for massive ordnance air blast bomb, also known as the “mother of all bombs,” was dropped on the tunnel complex in Achin from a US aircraft at 7:32 pm (1502 GMT) “as part of ongoing efforts to defeat ISIS-K in Afghanistan in 2017,” the Pentagon said in a news release.
“In my whole life I have never heard such huge boom,” Malik Mohammad, a tribal elder in Achin district told dpa. He said he lives about seven kilometers away from the bomb site but the wave still broke glasses inside his house while his family scattered for safety, scared.
Afghan army soldiers walk on Friday near a checkpoint 2 kilometres from the site of a blast in Eastern Nangarhar province, carried out with a massive US bomb. Thirty-six militants were killed in the attack, the Afghan Defence Ministry said. Rahman Safi/Xinhua via ZUMA Wire Photo: Rahman Safi/dpa
Haji Mohammad Sadeq, another tribal elder said civilians in immediate area of the Islamic State hideout “left the area long ago,” while others who remained were alerted by Afghan forces through mosques.
“The little number of civilians who remained in some houses were shifted by Afghan security forces’ vehicles in the late afternoon” Sadeq said.
According to the tribal elders, no civilian casualties have been reported so far. The cave system was in a mountainous area, away from civilian villages, the tribal elders confirmed.
“It shook the entire valley, I have never heard a sound so loud in my entire life,” Qadratullah, a resident of Achin district, the stronghold of Islamic State militants, told dpa on Friday.
Nangarhar’s Achin district is the birthplace of Islamic State in Afghanistan. The organization announced the establishment of its Khorasan branch, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan, in January 2015. It was the first time that Islamic State had officially spread outside the Arab world.
Former President Hamid Karzai was one of the first ones to condemn the bombing saying, “This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing ground for new and dangerous weapons.”
According to a press release by the US military in Afghanistan, the forces took “every precaution to avoid civilian casualties with this strike.”
“As ISIS-K’s losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense,” General John W. Nicholson, Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan said.
“This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against ISIS-K,” Nicholson added in the statement.
US President Donald Trump indicated he gave the order to use the weapon.
“What I do is I authorize my military,” he said at the White House. “We have given them total authorization and that’s what they’re doing and frankly that’s why they’ve been so successful lately.”
He further praised the US military and said it was “another very, very successful mission.”
The bomb, weighing nearly 10,000-kilogram, is a device guided by the global positioning system (GPS), and is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb that the United States possesses.
–dpa
