U.S. won’t disclose damage done by giant bomb on ISIS caves
KABUL, Afghanistan — Since the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” on an Islamic State cave complex in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, U.S. military officials have been circumspect about the bomb’s damage, but one voice has been filling the information vacuum in the region: Islamic State radio.
The reluctance of the United States to discuss casualties and other damage from the 22,000-pound bomb concerns local officials in Nangarhar province who supported the massive bomb after military officials said ground operations had failed to penetrate the Islamic State stronghold in the mountains of the Achin district.
“I and other people have this concern — that why American forces are not letting anyone visit the scene of the bombing?” said Zabihullah Zmarai, a member of the council in Nangarhar province who held a post-bombing news conference to announce his support. “The U.S. authorities should provide an answer to this question.”
Afghan security officials say that clearance operations are taking place around the site, and that Islamic State fighters are engaging Afghan and U.S. forces, who are calling in more airstrikes to target the militants’ positions. There are also reports that the U.S. military has kept even Afghan forces from the site.
One senior Afghan security official in Kabul said Tuesday that Thursday’s bombing killed 96 Islamic State militants, 13 of them major commanders. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, provided the names and basic information about the commanders, most of whom were from the tribal areas across the border in Pakistan, but who also included some Indian citizens and Central Asians. However, the official provided no proof of the deaths.
The U.S. military did not provide comment.
The Islamic State’s local radio outlet, which was unaffected by the bombing, continues to broadcast into Jalalabad, the urban center in the east. It broadcasts half-hour programs during the day and an evening program that often lasts more than an hour.
As early as the day after the bombing, it broadcast a call-in program in which voices of men who claimed to be fighters in the area who were not affected by the powerful bomb could be heard between rhyming Islamic chants.
Islamic State radio, known as Voice of the Caliphate, has been reconstituted after it was destroyed last year by a targeted U.S. drone attack. Afghan officials said that the earlier operation was run by five militants from the back of a small truck.
Islamic State affiliates in Afghanistan expanded rapidly in 2015, before repeated Afghan military operations and U.S. airstrikes brought them to a halt. Islamic State fighters are now estimated at about 700, down from 2,000 to 3,000, and their activities are reduced to mainly three districts in Nangarhar.
The tunnel complex in the Tangi Assadkhel area of Achin prevented military operations from eliminating the group entirely, U.S. military officials have said in justifying the first use of the bomb, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast.
It was unclear whether any Afghan or coalition forces have made it to the bombing site five days after the attack. The senior Afghan security official said the day after the bombing that Afghan commandos had done so and, after clearing the site, had handed it over to U.S. military forensic teams.
Zmarai, the provincial council member, said local officials in Achin told him that neither Afghan nor U.S. forces had arrived.
A spokesman for the Afghan commandos, Jawid Salim, expressed satisfaction that the bomb hit what he called an important target, and he seemed satisfied by the security official’s report that more than 90 fighters were killed. “They say it destroys everything within two miles, but that could be in plain land — in mountainous areas, the bomb may not have such big destruction,” Salim said.