World

US drops largest non-nuclear bomb on terror outposts in Afghanistan

The U.S. military dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday just days after a Green Beret was killed fighting ISIS there, a U.S. defense official confirmed to Fox News.

The GBU-43B, a 21,000-pound conventional bomb, was dropped on an ISIS tunnel complex in Nangarhar Province.

The MOAB — Massive Ordinance Air Blast — is also known as the “Mother Of All bombs.” It was first tested in 2003, but hadn’t been used before Thursday. The MOAB is so massive it had to be dropped out of the back of a U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane.

“We kicked it out the back door,” one U.S. official told Fox News. For comparison to the 21,000-pound MOAB, each Tomahawk cruise missile launched at Syria last week was 1,000-pounds each.

“At 7.32pm local time today, US Forces – Afghanistan conducted a strike on an ISIS-K tunnel complex in Achin district, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, as part of ongoing efforts to defeat ISIS-K in Afghanistan… The strike used a GBU-43 bomb dropped from a US aircraft,” the statement said.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), nicknamed the ‘Mother of All Bombs’, is a 21,600-pound, GPS-guided explosive. This is the first time that the US has used the MOAB bomb in combat.

Show More

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button