Taliban militants are openly active in 70 percent of Afghanistan, according to a BBC study published on Tuesday.

AVA- According to the study, the Taliban are in full control of 14 districts (4 percent of the country) and have an active and open physical presence in a further 263 distircts (66 percent).

The study was conducted between August and November last year and involved 1,200 individual local sources.

This comes as the coalition in Afghanistan said on Tuesday that the Taliban contested or controlled only 44 percent of Afghan districts as of October 2017. NATO’s Resolute Support mission’s spokesman, Tom Gresback, said this in response to a report that an independent federal auditor was barred from releasing data on Taliban territory in Afghanistan.

BBC said that 122 districts (just over 30 percent of the country) were under government control, but it noted that it does not mean they were free of violence.

“Kabul and other major cities, for example, suffered major attacks – launched from adjacent areas, or by sleeper cells – during the research period, as well as before and after,” the report said.

Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry rejected the report.

“When a bomb explodes in an area, would you believe that it is under enemy’s control,” Dawlat Waziri, a spokesman for MoD, told 1TV, adding Taliban are in control of few district centers.

Javed Faisal, deputy spokesman for Chief Executive, said that 80 percent of the country would be under government control by next elections.