Why US Dropped ‘Mother of All Bombs' in Afghanistan

Pakistani villagers living near the Afghan border said the explosion was so loud they thought a bomb had been dropped in their village

The "mother of all bombs" that the U.S. military dropped in Afghanistan Thursday is so big it has to be pushed out of a cargo plane with a parachute attached, NBC News reported.

The largest non-nuclear bomb the military has ever dropped, weighing 21,000 pounds, the GBU-43 creates a mushroom cloud visible up to 20 miles away. And it's notable that it wasn't used in current flashpoints like Syria or even North Korea.

"Afghanistan was not really on the agenda during Donald Trump's presidential campaign, but ISIS was," explained Emily Winterbotham, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

The militant group is attempting to establish a foothold along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, even though it's more than 1,500 miles from their stronghold in Iraq and Syria.

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