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The number of fighters leaving home to join al-Qaida and ISIS in Iraq, Syria and other countries has spiked to more than 25,000 from over 100 nations, The Associated Press reported, citing a new U.N. report.

The panel of experts monitoring U.N. sanctions against al-Qaida said in the report obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press that its analysis indicates the number of foreign terrorist fighters worldwide increased by 71 percent between mid-2014 and March 2015.

It said the scale of the problem has increased over the past three years and the flow of foreign fighters "is higher than it has ever been historically."

The overall number of foreign terrorist fighters has "risen sharply from a few thousand ... a decade ago to more than 25,000 today," the panel said in the report to the U.N. Security Council.

The report said just two countries have accounted for over 20,000 foreign fighters: Syria and Iraq. They went to fight primarily for the Islamic State group but also the Al-Nusra Front.

Looking ahead, the panel said the thousands of foreign fighters who traveled to Syria and Iraq are living and working in "a veritable 'international finishing school' for extremists," as was the case in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

In addition to Syria and Iraq, the report said Afghan security forces estimated in March that about 6,500 foreign fighters were active in the country. And it said hundreds of foreigners are fighting in Yemen, Libya and Pakistan, around 100 in Somalia, and others in the Sahel countries in northern Africa, and in the Philippines.

The panel said the fighters and their networks "pose an immediate and long-term threat" and "an urgent global security problem" that needs to be tackled on many fronts and has no easy solution.