US 'mother of all bombs' killed 36 ISIL militants in Afghanistan

As many as 36 suspected Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants were killed in Afghanistan when the United States dropped "the mother of all bombs," one of the largest non-nuclear devices ever unleashed in combat, the Afghan Defense Ministry said on April 14.

The strike on April 13 came as U.S. President Donald Trump dispatches his first high-level delegation to Kabul, amid uncertainty about his plans for the nearly 9,000 American troops stationed in Afghanistan.

The deaths have not been independently verified, but ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri said no civilians were harmed in the massive blast that targeted a network of caves and tunnels.

"No civilian has been hurt and only the base, which Daesh used to launch attacks in other parts of the province, was destroyed," Waziri said in a statement, using an Arabic acronym for ISIL.

The 9,797 kilogram GBU-43 bomb, was dropped from an MC-130 aircraft in the Achin district of the eastern province of Nangarhar bordering Pakistan, Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said on April 13.

The device, also known as the "mother of all bombs," is a GPS-guided munition that had never before been used in combat since its first test in 2003, when it produced a mushroom cloud visible from 32 kilometers away.

The bomb's destructive power, equivalent to 11 tons of TNT, pales in comparison with the relatively small atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War Two, which had blasts equivalent to between 15,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT.

The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan said on April 14 the decision to deploy one of the largest conventional bombs ever unleashed in combat was a purely tactical decision made as part of the campaign against ISIL-linked...