'Terrorist groups' enjoy freedom in Afghanistan: U.N. experts

‘No signs of the Taliban taking steps to limit the activities of foreign terrorist fighters in the country’.

past ties to the recently empowered Taliban have the potential of making Afghanistan a safe haven for extremists, and “terrorist groups enjoy greater freedom there than at any time in recent history,” U.N. experts said in a report circulated Monday, February 7, 2022.

In the wide-ranging report, the experts also said extremists linked to both al-Qaida and the Islamic State group are successfully advancing in Africa, especially in the turbulent Sahel. And they said the Islamic State continues to operate “as an entrenched rural insurgency” in Iraq and Syria, where its so-called caliphate ruled a significant swathe of the two countries from 2014-2017 when it was defeated by Iraqi forces and a U.S.-led coalition.

In what it called “a bright spot” in Southeast Asia, the panel of experts said both Indonesia and the Philippines reported “significant gains” in disrupting Islamic State and al-Qaida-affiliated “terrorism" and “some optimism" that their operational capability “may be significantly degraded." The report to the U.N. Security Council by the panel of experts monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida and the Islamic State, also known as IS and ISIL, called the Taliban's return to power on Aug. 15 amid theafter 20 years the most significant event of the last six months of 2021.