Airstrikes destroy entire blocks and compounds. Missiles soar across borders. Drones rain lethal destruction. The major players, both human and organizational, are their own intricate story. As seen in the map above, the airstrikes from both sides have reverberated across the region for days.
The latest conflict in the Middle East is swift, violent, spread out and deeply complex. And with all the fast-moving developments, the escalating fighting between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other can be hard to understand, much less visualize.
This collection of visuals from The Associated Press — interactive maps, satellite imagery, sliding before-and-after shots — is designed to offer an alternative, or at least a companion to, the words that describe what’s happening.
In this space, we’ll show the ways that the war is unfolding, the people involved in it and the impact it’s having — physical, political and visceral. Some maps and other elements will be fixtures, evolving from day to day. Others will be subbed in and out as events warrant.
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To the left: Iran Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s compound before the morning of Feb. 28. To the right: the same location in the wake of airstrikes.
This is what graphics journalists call “a slider”: Swipe the arrows in the middle to see the full before-and-after — architecture before, mere rubble afterward.
Khamenei and uncounted other Iranian leaders were killed in the strike, effectively severing the top of the theocratic government to a still-unknown extent. The photos show not only the destruction but the pinpoint accuracy of the aircrafts’ payloads in this attack: While the compound itself was leveled, many of the buildings around it remain visibly intact.
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This graphic “carousel” shows the slate of contenders who might replace Khamenei as Iran’s senior spiritual leader.
Among them: Former President Hassan Rouhani, who reached the landmark nuclear agreement with the Obama administration that Trump scrapped; and Mojtaba Khamenei, the slain senior leader’s son. Though only a midlevel cleric, he is widely seen as a potential successor to his father, though he has never held political office.
Also on the list is a relative moderate, Hassan Khomeini, not known well outside of Iran and its religious and political circles. He is the grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who orchestrated Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution and ruled as supreme leader for a decade before he died and was replaced by Khamenei.
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Whenever anything happens in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, the question of oil is never too far away from the conversation — particularly where Iran is concerned.
This graphic shows the volatility in oil prices in the days after the first attacks on Iran before early Saturday. Oil prices are often volatile, but conflict tends to send them askew in more acute ways — and as long as the conflict continues, that could well be the case.
Note in particular the spikes: The current price per barrel of U.S. crude oil, already on the way up this year as tensions with Iran increased, rose above $70 a barrel in the days after Saturday’s strike on Iran. It was the highest that US crude has been since July, when the 12-day Israel-Iran war jacked it to nearly $75 a barrel temporarily.
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A key element in any war related to the Persian Gulf is sea might and capability. This map shows the approximate location of destroyers under the command of the United States and the Trump administration.
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When Iran is attacked by the United States and its allies, it strikes back regionally against those hosting U.S. and allied operations.
As this map shows, a whole host of nearby nations have experienced attacks from Iran in recent days — including Israel, Cyprus, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, including Dubai.
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Bookmark this as a one-stop shop to seeing and learning about what’s going on in the conflict as it unfolds. (And if you’re interested in the latest words on the matter, this hub is a good place to start.)
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Panagiotis Mouzakis in London contributed.
