The aircraft would only fly at over 10km altitude after starting and certainly while flying over enemy territory of the Taliban.
Weather or mountains are no issue at those altitudes.
Those aircraft are very reliable with two even more reliable engines that would of course allow safe landing with just one working.
Crash landing in a Taliban held region means either a massive system failure and a condition in which it was not possible to even glide into non Taliban held territory.
Taliban has no weapon able to shot down such a high flying aircraft.
There officially exists no weapon able to shot down such a high flying aircraft and be operated by a guerrilla force the Taliban is.
Unofficially such weapons exist and that Iranian ones captured on their way to Yemen are one example.
However in such cloudy weather conditions it would need to be something else, maybe a related variant.
Lets see if such cases happen more often in the future...
Americans are aware of it. First only Houthi ground launched R-27T were believed to be responsible for the drone shoot downs there.
But as Trump said "they (Iranians) shot down 3 of our drones", one RQ-4 and one MQ-9 are the known ones.
Iran will probably never admit that such a weapon exists since it is primarily for secret operations where no friendly IADS exists.
So if this was a shot down, Americans could easily declare it as a crash, because it was shot down by a weapon that officially does not exists. The red line of american lifes had already been crossed by Iran with the Ain Al-Assed attack, even if miraculously no one was killed there.
At the end let me be clear: It could be both, simple crash or shot down, I have no reason to be certain about it at this point.
