"'The [U.N.] monitoring team goes to great lengths to try to triangulate information, and it publishes things that it's reasonably confident of, and that goes through a rigorous editorial process,' Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former senior United Nations counterterrorism official and monitoring team coordinator, told VOA.

Fitton-Brown, now an adviser to the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, said that even if there are disagreements over the extent to which al-Qaida or IS-Khorasan have grown their footprints in Afghanistan, the larger point remains."