Mattis won’t reveal death toll from ‘mother of all bombs’

Defense Secretary James Mattis is staying mum on the casualties that resulted from the U.S. dropping its largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan last week. 

During a trip to Israel on Thursday, Mattis told reporters that the Pentagon doesn’t usually measure an attack’s effectiveness by how many people are killed, and he refused to provide details about the damage caused by the Massive Ordnance Air Blast.

“For many years we have not been calculating the results of warfare by simply quantifying the number of enemy killed,” Mattis said, according to The Associated Press.

{mosads}The U.S. military last week dropped a GBU-43B on a tunnel complex used by ISIS in Afghanistan. The strike was the first time the U.S. used its “mother of all bombs” in combat. 

The Afghan government estimated that the weapon killed more than 90 ISIS militants. No civilians died in the attack, it said. 

While the Pentagon has remained silent on this attack’s impact, it has spoken out on other similar operations in the past. In January, for example, the Defense Department announced that an airstrike on a Qaeda training camp in Syria killed more than 100 fighters.