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Fox News celebrated the attack with a Toby Keith song. Photograph: Handout/AFP/Getty Images

The US dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing at least 36 Isis militants and, as local people told the Guardian, sending tremors through the ground like a boat in a storm as flames enveloped the sky.

But to Fox News which celebrated the bombing in an excited segment of the show Fox and Friends on Friday morning this was what freedom looked like.

Grainy black-and-white footage of a bomb exploding and flattened Afghanistan desert played on the morning show, accompanied with country music, as if it were a music video.

You hear Mother Freedom / Start ringin her bell / And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you / Brought to you courtesy of the red, white and blue, crooned country singer Toby Keith, timed perfectly with the explosion.

That videos black and white, but that is what freedom looks like, declared Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt. Thats the red, white and blue.

The talkshow host Geraldo Rivera replied: One of my favorite things, in the 16 years Ive been here at Fox News, is watching bombs drop on bad guys.

But while Fox News applauded the Afghanistan bomb footage, others in the US media were a little more skeptical.

Thursdays bombing had a feeling of deja vu, wrote CNNs national security analyst Peter Bergen, referring to the deadly daisy-cutter bombs used in Afghanistan in 2001. Thats a useful reminder that very few military campaigns are won from the air.

On the more liberally minded MSNBC show Morning Joe, guests seemed sceptical about the need for the bomb.

This is a strange use of this very large ordinance, said David Ignatius, a foreign policy commentator.

I think the statement is: Hey folks, the gloves are off. The military benefits of using it in Afghanistan in this way are probably limited but the signal is pretty powerful, said Ignatius.

Apart from that of Fox News, the media reactions were more subdued than those last week when 58 Tomahawk missiles were dropped on Syrian airfields in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons against civilians, and the media greeted the news excitedly.

I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night, said Fareed Zakaria, host of CNNs flagship foreign affairs program, after the Syria attack.

The New York Times headlined an opinion piece On Syria attack, Trumps heart came first before later toning it down online.

It was hard not to feel some sense of emotional satisfaction, and justice done, when American cruise missiles struck an airfield in Syria on Thursday, read a Times editorial.

Brian Williams, the NBC host who publicly fell from grace after he presented falsehoods about his experiences, called the footage of the US military striking Syria beautiful pictures twice, and noted: I am tempted to quote the late Leonard Cohen: Im guided by the beauty of our weapons, a reference to the Cohen song First We Take Manhattan.

I mean this with all due respect: the sales department at the Pentagon, especially in the era of moving pictures, is very effective, Williams said.

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Fox News sets Afghanistan bombing to Toby Keith song as other outlets voice doubt - The Guardian

New York Times

Donald Trump, United Airlines, Afghanistan: Your Evening Briefing New York Times 1. China called for calm on all sides as North Korea intensified its saber-rattling ahead of its founder's day celebrations, and a United States Navy strike group approached the region. The North said on Friday that it could annihilate American ... and more »

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Donald Trump, United Airlines, Afghanistan: Your Evening Briefing - New York Times

A retired U.S. Marine said that former President Obama should have supported dropping the 'Mother of all Bombs' while he was the commander-in-chief.

Staff Sgt. Joey Jones, who lost both his legs in Afghanistan in 2010 when an IED exploded, said on "The O'Reilly Factor" that the incident happened when he was sent into a ghost town that was littered with improvised explosive devices.

"The commanders were given the opportunity to use a bomb instead of sending more green beret in there to die. That's amazing to me, that's a change in procedure and it's something that I feel like we should recognize," Jones, of Peachtree City, Georgia, said.

While tweeting about the MOAB that was used earlier this week in Syria, he got into an argument with another veteran and clarified why he feels there's been a shift coming from the top.

"It's a change of perspective, a change of intent from our commander in chief," Jones said. "What's more important, our lives and hte mission at hand or how it's perceived in the world?"

Although pundits have speculated about the "statement" the bomb might be sending to Iran and North Korea, as well as Syria's Assad, Jones believes the real statement was made to the American men and women serving in combat roles fighting ISIS.

"The most important message it sent is to the troops on the ground--it's letting them know that when they have to make a tough choice or a strategic choice, they now can do that," he said. "If they have an opportunity to accomplish the mission without putting their necks on the line every single day, that's now an option."

Jones added that in 2010, he felt unsupported by the White House. But based on the feedback he's gotten and what he believes now, the Marines now feel supported in a different way by President Donald Trump.

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Retired Marine who lost his legs in Afghanistan: Obama should have ... - Fox News

Online donations have poured in for the family of a Green Beret killed in action while fighting ISIS extremists in Afghanistan over the weekend, Fox & Friends reported Friday.

The GoFundMe page for Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencars wife and five children raised more than $181,000 by Friday morning, far surpassing the original goal of $15,000.

Fox & Friends reports that a family friend started the GofundMe campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/ssg-mark-de-alencar. Nikki Damron wrote on the GoFundMe page that De Alencars wife now has the task of raising their five kids on her own. The children range in age from 3 to 17.

AFGHANISTAN: MARYLAND GREEN BERET KILLED IN ISIS

Our community has been hit hard in the last passing months and I just felt the need to try and do my part and help out his family, Damron wrote. Joining SF was a huge dream of Mark's, one he worked very hard to achieve.

Damron wrote that she was a military wife.

De Alencar, 37, of Edgewood, Maryland, died Saturday of wounds sustained when his unit encountered enemy small arms fire in Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province.

He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.

The Pentagon dropped the mother of all bombs on an ISIS tunnel complex in Nangarhar Thursday, killing 39 ISIS militants.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Afghanistan: Friend raises $181,000 for family of Green Beret killed ... - Fox News

The U.S. military dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb on an ISIS tunnel complex in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, a U.S. defense official confirmed to Fox News.

The GBU-43B, a 21,000-pound conventional bomb, was deployed in Nangarhar Province close to the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. By comparison, each Tomahawk cruise missile launched at a Syrian military air base last week weighed 1,000 pounds each.

The MOAB -- Massive Ordnance Air Blast -- is also known as the Mother Of All Bombs. It was first tested in 2003, but hadn't been used in combat before Thursday.

Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said the bomb had been brought to Afghanistan "some time ago" for potential use.The bomb explodes in the air, creating air pressure that can make tunnels and other structures collapse. It can be used at the start of an offensive to soften up the enemy, weakening both its infrastructure and morale.

"As [ISIS'] losses have mounted, they are using IEDs, bunkers and tunnels to thicken their defense," Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement. "This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against [ISIS]."

President Trump told media Thursday afternoon that "this was another successful mission" and he gavethe military total authorization.

Trump was also asked whether dropping the bomb sends a warning to North Korea.

"North Korea is a problem, the problem will be taken care of," said Trump.

WHAT IS THE 'MOTHER OF ALL BOMBS'?

The MOAB had to be dropped out of the back of a U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane due to its massive size.

"We kicked it out the back door," one U.S. official told Fox News.

Ismail Shinwari, the governor of Achin district, said the U.S. attack was carried out in a remote mountainous area with no civilian homes nearby and that there had been no reports of injured civilians. He said there has been heavy fighting in the area in recent weeks between Afghan forces and ISIS militants.

Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan, posted on Twitter that he condemned the attack "vehemently" and "in [the] strongest words."

"This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as [a] testing ground for new and dangerous weapons," Karzai said. "It is upon us, Afghans, to stop the #USA."

The strike came just days after a Green Beret was killed fighting ISIS in Nangarhar, however, a U.S. defense official told Fox News the bombing had nothing to do with that casualty.

It was the right weapon for the right target, and not in retaliation, the official said.

The U.S. estimates thatbetween 600 to 800 ISIS fighters are present in Afghanistan, mostly in Nangarhar. The U.S. has concentrated heavily on combatting them while also supporting Afghan forces battling the Taliban.

In August, a company of nearly 150 Army Rangers killed "hundreds" of ISIS fighters in Nangarhar, though five of the Rangers were shot. Some weapons and equipment, including communications gear and a rocket launcher, were also left behind following the operation.

Fox News' Martin Hinton and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews

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