Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

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This is one of the most effective infographics I've seen, right up there with Napoleon's March to Moscow[1]. I spent at least an hour with it this morning and it changed my understanding of Iraq, Syria and ISIL.

I'm used to thinking in terms of national borders, but this shows how the population is organized by the Tigris and Euphrates, not by artificial lines on a map.

ISIL understands this well, making the Iraq/Syria border into a pretty meaningless imaginary line. The ISIL blitz seems like it came from nowhere, but this dramatically illustrates their methodical progression, over time, following the rivers.

I found myself wanting to know more about the communities, lakes, dams, roads, borders, sects, nationalities other features highlighted in this piece, so I spent another hour manually linking to Google Earth and Wikipedia to drill into more detail.

Along the way I found a lot of content on YouTube of ISIL takeovers of cities, burning of vehicles and disturbing images of executions and crucifixions. I'd seen some of this before, but it would be really powerful to link selected videos and images from the ground directly to places on the map.

I'd be interested in the editorial process at the NYT, how this evolved from idea to realization, who supplied the content, and how the development team coordinated with the reporters.

And I'd like to understand more about how the autonomous Kurdish region fits into this story, both geographically as well as politically and militarily.

[1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad to hear it sparked a Wikipedia quest for you...

The idea here was to try and find some sort of larger set piece graphic we could bring to bear on the crisis in Iraq — and after a couple of days of staring at lots of maps of the desert, it struck me that:

1. The Euphrates is both very long, and very straight for its length. Most rivers would have zig-zagged in such a way that you couldn't do a linear scroll.

2. Visually, the river against the desert is extremely striking, and the wide expanses of empty land are perfect for labeling.

3. Because that's where the water is, almost all settlement and activity in northern and western Iraq run along these river lines.

... so that's where the idea came from. It was a pretty lucky combination of geography and news circumstances. After that came the really quite long and difficult process of figuring out the current status of small towns and cities — much of which is uncertain and hard to find reliable sources on — and doing the writing and editing of the piece. Karen Yourish and Archie Tse did a real marathon of reporting to get that done. Towards the end, the Baghdad bureau kindly went through and confirmed the information that wound up in the final piece, and made additional suggestions for points of interest.

The Kurdish region isn't really addressed in this particular graphic, but you can see many of those towns in the northern part of the Tigris image, over on the right (not under ISIS control).

"I found myself wanting to know more [...], so I spent another hour manually linking to Google Earth and Wikipedia to drill into more detail. / Along the way I found a lot of content on YouTube..."

Completely off-topic, but this is why network access should be considered crucial to human existence.

Technically not off-topic, just a digression.

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