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Security forces deny access to site of US blast in Afghanistan
[DAWN] Security forces were still blocking access Wednesday to the site in eastern Afghanistan where the United States dropped a massive bomb on a stronghold of the turban Islamic State...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... group six days ago. The US military dropped its GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, dubbed the "Mother of All Bombs", in combat for the first time on April 13. The target was caves and hideouts being used by the turban group in the Achin district of Nangarhar The unfortunate Afghan province located adjacent to Mohmand, Kurram, and Khyber Agencies. The capital is Jalalabad. The province was the fief of Younus Khalis after the Soviets departed and one of his sons is the current provincial Taliban commander. Nangarhar is Haqqani country.. province. The blast triggered shock waves, which residents said they felt miles away. It was said by the Afghan defence ministry to have killed at least 95 turbans, including some IS commanders and imported muscle, but no civilians. The statement could not be independently verified, with news hounds including AFP correspondents turned away from the site again Wednesday even though there was no sign of fighting in the immediate area. Ahmad Jan, a resident of Achin who fled IS fighting and moved with his family to the lovely provincial capital Jalalabad long before the bomb was dropped, told AFP he had no idea whether his house or relatives survived the attack. "No one can go there, they have completely blocked the area. I don't know if my house is destroyed. They have not even shown any dead bodies to anyone," he said. A front man for Afghan special forces said landmines and "pockets of resistance" on top of mountains had slowed down operations in the area. He did not specify if the fighters were from the IS. Police officials in Nangarhar could not immediately comment, and US-led NATO ...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions... forces in Afghanistan would not comment Wednesday. They said this week they were still assessing the situation. Some Afghans have condemned the use of their country as what they called a testing ground for the weapon, and against a turban group that is not considered as big a threat as the resurgent Taliban. Analyst and retired general Atiqullah Amarkhail told AFP the US military needed time to analyse the impact and clean the debris. "It was not an ordinary bomb. It carried a special kind of explosives, it was tested in a mountainous area for the first time, I believe a team of US experts are now working on the ground to assess the effects and impacts," he said. Posted by: Fred 2017-04-20 |
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