The U.S. announced on Thursday it had dropped the “mother of all bombs” on an ISIS facility in Afghanistan, using one of the nation’s largest non-nuclear devices on the battlefield for the first time ever.

Up to 36 suspected Islamic State militants were killed in Afghanistan when the US dropped the GBU-43/B , the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat, the Afghan defence ministry said on Friday. The bomb targeted what the military described as a “tunnel complex” used by the Isis’s Afghanistan affiliate.

Dawlat Waziri, an Afghan ministry spokesman said of Thursday’s strike: “No civilian has been hurt and only the base, which Daesh used to launch attacks in other parts of the province, was destroyed.”

The news came a week after President Trump ordered a strike on a Syrian air base, a surprise move that’s flipped the power dynamic between Russia and the U.S. by forcing Moscow to react to sudden shifts in American policy.

Asked whether he had authorized the bombing, Donald Trump said: “Everybody knows exactly what happened. What I do is I authorize my military. We have the greatest military in the world and they’ve done a job as usual. We have given them total authorization and that’s what they’re doing and frankly that’s why they’ve been so successful lately”, as reported in The Guardian.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has described the Syrian strike as a warning to other nations, including North Korea, which is reportedly planning another nuclear test. 

Did this bombing send a message to North Korea? “I don’t know if this sends a message; it doesn’t make any difference if it does or not,” the president said. “North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of.” He implied that China was “working very hard” on this issue.

As reported in The Guardian.