US drops ‘mother of all bombs’ on Islamic State hideout

The US has just dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb it has ever used, in the hope of taking out Islamic State militants hiding in eastern Afghanistan.

The GBU-43 ‘Massive Ordnance Air Blast’ bomb, which weighs almost 10 tonne, blasted a network of caves and tunnels used by the terror group, the US defence department said. The MOAB bomb is also known by the military as the ‘mother of all bombs’.

A US Green Beret had been killed by militants in the same area last week.

US army general John W. Nicholson, who’s the commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, said that as IS had sustained losses in the country, the group had taken to using bunkers and tunnels as a defence.

“This is the right munition to reduce those obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive,” he said.

Experts told Reuters that the GBU-43 was particularly useful in targetting tunnels just under the ground.

“This is a very specialised weapon, we don’t have many of them, you can only use them in a very narrow set of circumstances, Mark Cancian, a Centre for Strategies and International Studies senior advisor, told the newswire.

Whitehouse spokesman Sean Spicer said that militants had been using the tunnels to target US and Afghan forces.

“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,” he said.

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