NEWS COMMENT
The U.S. military says it has dropped the “mother of all bombs” on a series of caves in eastern Afghanistan.
Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said it was the first time this type of bomb had been used in combat.
The GBU-43 bomb, weighing 21,600 lbs (9,797 kgs), is GPS-guided, contains 11 tonnes of explosives and is the US military’s largest non-nuclear device.
America loves the idea of resolving world problems by dropping bombs and creating carnage. This approach was used by Barack Obama and will no doubt now be used by his successor Donald Trump.
President Obama did reduce the number of US soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but he dramatically expanded the air wars and the use of special operations forces around the globe. In 2016, US special operators could be found in 70% of the world’s nations, 138 countries – a jump of 130% since the days of the Bush administration.
On Obama’s legacy, the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko added up the defense department’s data on airstrikes. In 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs.
This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.
While most of these air attacks were in Syria and Iraq, US bombs also rained down on people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. That’s seven majority-Muslim countries.
Seems this trend of showering bombs on the Muslim world will continue in full force with Trump and his war machine.
وَسَيَعْلَمُ الَّذِينَ ظَلَمُوا أَيَّ مُنقَلَبٍ يَنقَلِبُونَ
“And those who do wrong will come to know by what overturning they will be overturned” {Ash-Shu’raa: 227}
News Article: US military drops ‘mother of all bombs on IS’ in Afghanistan
The US military has dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal on an Islamic State group tunnel complex in Afghanistan, the Pentagon says.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), known as “the mother of all bombs”, was first tested in 2003, but had not been used before in combat.
The Pentagon said it was dropped from a US aircraft in Nangarhar province.
The news came hours after the Pentagon admitted an air strike in Syria mistakenly killed 18 rebels.
It said a partnered force had mistakenly identified the target location as an IS position, but the strike on 11 April had killed rebels from the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is backed by Washington.
The strike in Afghanistan follows last week’s death of a US special forces soldier fighting IS in Nangarhar.
The 21,600lb (9,800kg) bomb was dropped in Achin district on Thursday evening local time, the Pentagon said. It is more than 9m (30 feet) in length.
“We targeted a system of tunnels and caves that ISIS fighters use to move around freely, making it easier for them to target US military advisers and Afghan forces in the area,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, using another name for IS.
He said necessary precautions were taken to prevent civilian casualties and “collateral damage”.
Gen John Nicholson, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, said the jihadist group’s “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.”
IS announced the establishment of its Khorasan branch – an old name for Afghanistan and surrounding areas – in January 2015. It was the first time that IS had officially spread outside the Arab world.
It was the first major militant group to directly challenge the Afghan Taliban’s dominance over the local insurgency.
However, experts say it has struggled to build a wide political base and the indigenous support it expected in Afghanistan.
Estimates about IS’s numerical strength inside Afghanistan vary, ranging from 1,000 to 5,000.
