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STATUS

Updates & Data

Atlynx 0.15 Beta

Current State

Atlynx is currently in version 0.15 beta. De facto borders for fast-changing conflicts are manually updated. Once the first full release is finalized, borders for major conflicts will be updated at least once a week. This project is carried out by a single person who is a full-time student. Therefore, I ask all of you a bit of patience, I know the website is far from complete or perfect and I am here to improve with you!

Ukraine

Needs update

The Russo-Ukrainian frontline (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson) has moved since it was last drawn and needs a refresh.

Lebanon

Up to date

Recent Israeli occupations in southern Lebanon is reflected.

Last border update: 24 August 2026

Congo (DRC)

Needs update

Rebel-controlled borders in eastern Congo are not fully mapped. M23 is present, but other rebels need to be added. Coming in 1-2 weeks.

Yemen

Up to date

Houthi, government, and other faction borders are up to date. The Southern Transitional Council no longer holds territory as a separate authority — its former area is now drawn as government-held, hatched where separatist remnants persist.

Last border update: 10 August 2026

Sudan

Needs update

RSF and SAF territorial control has shifted since the borders were last drawn and needs a refresh.

Syria

Up to date

Reflects the dissolution of the SDF and the return of the northeast to Damascus. Government, Druze, Israeli-held and Turkish-garrisoned areas are all current.

Last border update: 24 August 2026

Myanmar

Up to date

Resistance and ethnic armed organization territory boundaries are up to date.

Somalia

Up to date

Al-Shabaab and government-controlled areas are relatively stable and up to date.

Libya

Up to date

GNA and LNA territorial control borders are up to date.

Central African Republic

Needs update

Government and armed group territorial control needs a refresh — the borders currently shown are no longer current.

Niger

Up to date

Borders and Sahel alliance territorial representation are up to date.

Mali

Up to date

Government, Tuareg, and jihadist-controlled area borders are up to date.

Burkina Faso

Up to date

Government and JNIM/ISGS-influenced area borders are up to date.

Ethiopia

Not yet available

Internal conflict borders (Tigray, Amhara, Oromia regions) are not yet mapped. Coming soon.

Cameroon

Not yet available

The Anglophone conflict is not yet mapped — separatist control across the Northwest and Southwest regions, and Boko Haram / ISWAP activity in the Far North.

Colombia

Not yet available

Armed group territory is not yet mapped — the ELN, FARC dissident fronts and the Clan del Golfo hold or contest ground across Catatumbo, Cauca, Chocó and the Venezuelan border.

Mexico

Not yet available

Cartel territorial control is not yet mapped — Sinaloa, the CJNG and the smaller regional organizations that dominate large parts of the country.

Afghanistan

Not yet available

Not yet mapped. The Taliban hold the country, so the map here is less about frontlines than about where Islamic State–Khorasan and remaining resistance fronts are active.

Past Updates

2026-08-24

Syria — the SDF dissolves, and the northeast returns to Damascus

  • The Syrian Democratic Forces have ceased to exist as a territorial authority. Their forces were folded into the Syrian Ministry of Defence and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria handed its institutions to Damascus, completing the integration agreed in March 2025. The Kurdish-led northeast — Raqqa, Hasakah, Qamishli, Kobane — is now drawn in Syrian government green, and the belt those two administered jointly along the old contact line has gone with it. The Syrian government now controls most of the country for the first time since 2012.
  • Because a present-day map cannot show a faction that no longer exists, Syria’s panel now carries an archive. A new "Syrian Democratic Forces" section records the dissolution and lets you step the map back to two earlier snapshots — 13 August and 14 February 2026 — painting the SDF’s territory at each date over the current borders. The 13 August view is the group’s final mapped extent, and distinguishes the areas it held outright from the belt it administered jointly with Damascus. Old links to the SDF still work: they now open Syria with that final extent drawn over it.
  • One limit is worth stating plainly: the archive does not reach the SDF at its largest. The oldest snapshot, 14 February 2026, is already after the offensives that followed the fall of Assad took much of what the group once held — the fuller earlier extent was never mapped here, so it cannot be shown. A 22 April 2026 survey also exists but is not offered as a separate date, because its SDF borders are identical to February’s and listing it would imply a change that did not happen.
  • The Turkish garrison belt across northern Syria has been renamed "Strong Turkish Military Presence" and redrawn to match what it is. It was previously hatched half in Syrian green and half in Turkish red, which read as shared ownership; the red is now a quarter-width pinstripe over government green. Syria holds and administers the ground, Turkey has more than 20,000 troops standing on it under the December 2025 defence pact. The Turkish bases inside Iraqi Kurdistan keep their solid red — those remain an occupation, over Baghdad’s objections.
  • Underlying all of it, the Middle East borders and control polygons were rebuilt from a fresh survey dated 24 August 2026.
2026-08-16

U.S. Navy fleet tracker — refreshed to 10 August 2026

  • The U.S. fleet panel now follows the USNI News Fleet and Marine Tracker of 10 August 2026, replacing the April snapshot. Battle force counts were updated too: 289 ships total, 96 deployed, 63 underway.
  • Two carriers are now in the Arabian Sea — Abraham Lincoln, on Operation Epic Fury, and George H.W. Bush, which has arrived from the South Atlantic — alongside the Boxer amphibious group with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the sea base Miguel Keith. George Washington has started its first patrol of the year in the South China Sea after a port call at Da Nang.
  • Elsewhere: Gerald R. Ford and Nimitz have come off the map, Carl Vinson and Theodore Roosevelt are in port at San Diego, the Tripoli group is home at Sasebo after its Middle East patrol, Essex has left Pearl Harbor, and the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit is now spread across the Caribbean as Littoral Combat Force 24 rather than sailing with an amphibious group.
  • Expeditionary sea bases are a new ship category on the map, and several homeports were corrected — the Bahrain-based littoral combat ships Canberra, Tulsa and Santa Barbara, plus Tripoli and Rushmore at Sasebo.
2026-08-16

218 B.C. — every nation now has its own page

  • Selecting a nation on the 218 B.C. map now changes the address bar, the way it already did on the 431 B.C., Odyssey and present-day maps. Each of the 142 polities has its own link — atlynxmaps.com/218bc/polity/roman-republic, /carthage, /seleucid-empire — and so does every territory you can drill into beneath them, such as Rome’s provinces or Macedon’s Fetters of Greece: 368 pages in all.
  • Opening one of those links goes straight to that nation: its panel opens and the map flies to it. The browser’s back and forward buttons now retrace your path through the map, and any view you reach can be copied out of the address bar and shared.
  • Each page also carries its own title and description for search engines and link previews, drawn from the nation’s own dossier text, and all 368 have been added to the site map so they can be found and indexed.
2026-08-15

Cyprus — base locations verified

  • Every military installation on Cyprus was re-checked against published coordinates and most were adjusted. The largest correction moved the Dhekelia garrison about four kilometres to the actual cantonment; the Turkish division garrisons, the Boğaz naval base, the ELDYK camp, the Ayios Nikolaos listening station and the UN sector camps at Skouriotissa and Xeros were all tightened to their villages or published positions. RAF Akrotiri, the Blue Beret Camp and Wolseley Barracks were already exact.
2026-08-13

v0.15 — Middle East: Borders Refreshed, Part 1

  • In short: the Middle East borders were redrawn from the August survey, and the whole Levant became a first-class part of the map. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Cyprus each got their own colours and legends; shared and qualified control is now drawn honestly (hatches for the SDF–Damascus strip, the Turkish belt and Hezbollah’s zone, dots for Islamic State remnants); Turkey’s view separates what it controls from who it influences; missing bases were added and stale ones corrected; and the country panel is now resizable in every direction. The details:
  • The whole Middle East border set has been redrawn from the August survey, replacing the 25 July version. It covers Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Iraq including the Kurdistan Region.
  • The belt along the northern contact line that Damascus and the SDF administer jointly is now mapped in its own right. It is drawn in Syrian green hatched with SDF yellow, its edge is dotted like other de facto lines, and selecting Syria and then clicking it opens a panel explaining the shared arrangement.
  • The boundary of the Druze insurgency around Suwayda in southern Syria has been redrawn, along with an internal Syrian government line.
  • The northern border belt is no longer drawn as Turkish-held. Civil administration there was handed back to the Syrian government in stages after the fall of Assad and the transfer finished in January 2026, but Turkish troops stayed — so it is now drawn as Syrian territory hatched in Turkish red, and clicking it opens a panel explaining the arrangement. Turkey’s presence in northern Iraq is a different case and is still drawn as an occupation.
  • Hezbollah-held territory inside Lebanon continues to be drawn with dotted boundaries, marking it as de facto rather than a recognized border. The line where the SDF and Damascus share control is now dotted as well.
  • Syria now has its own colours: government green for Damascus, yellow for the SDF, and violet for the Druze of Suwayda, with a colour key in the panel. Selecting any of them paints the whole theatre.
  • Turkey’s map now separates control from alignment. What Turkey controls or garrisons — Turkey itself, Northern Cyprus, the Iraqi outposts, the hatched Syrian belt — fills solid; aligned states (Syria, the Tripoli government in Libya, Qatar, Azerbaijan) keep their own colour with a Turkish-red outline instead of being washed in occupation red. A button in the Turkey panel switches the whole sphere off at once, and each legend entry can be hidden individually.
  • The dashed lines running from Ankara to Damascus, Tripoli and Baku have been removed — the outlines carry that information now. The Qatar–Turkey line survives only on Qatar’s own panel.
  • Selecting any part of Cyprus now shows every military installation on the island — the six Turkish garrisons in the north, the Greek ELDYK camp, the five UN posts along the Green Line, and the British bases, which were missing entirely: RAF Akrotiri, the Dhekelia garrison and the Ayios Nikolaos listening station have been added.
  • Cyprus is now drawn in full. Selecting the Republic, Northern Cyprus or the UN buffer paints the whole island: Republic copper, the TRNC in Turkey’s own red — it exists by Turkish arms and recognition — the British Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia in navy, and the UN Green Line in UN blue.
  • Lebanon is now drawn in its own right: government red, Hezbollah’s zone in the party’s yellow, and the Israeli-occupied strips of the south in occupation blue. Hezbollah is treated as what it is — not a country, but a zone of de facto control inside Lebanon: selecting Lebanon and clicking its area opens a dedicated panel, with the dotted line marking where the state’s writ gives way.
  • Iraq now has its own colours. Selecting Iraq, Kurdistan or the Islamic State paints the whole picture: federal red for Baghdad, and the Kurdistan Region split into its two de facto zones — KDP yellow around Erbil and Duhok, PUK green around Sulaymaniyah. With Kurdistan selected, clicking a zone drills into it: a panel explains that party’s rule while the other zone dims. Islamic State areas are drawn as dots over the federal colour rather than a solid fill: IS holds no territory in Iraq, persisting as remnant cells in the rural seams, and the map should not suggest otherwise. The Turkish outposts in the Kurdish north also show in this view.
  • The country panel can now be resized sideways as well as vertically: grab its left or right edge to make it wider or narrower (double-click an edge to reset). The chosen width sticks as you browse between countries.
  • Turkey’s legend now names the relationships instead of abstractions: Syria and the Tripoli government appear in their own greens as quasi-satellites, Qatar as a strategic ally, and every entry — including the optional Growing Turkish Influence shading, off by default — can be switched on and off directly from the legend.
  • Turkey now has a drill-down of its own. Selecting Turkey and then clicking the border belt in Syria, or the outposts inside Iraqi Kurdistan, opens a panel for each. The two are described differently on purpose: Turkish forces are in Syria with Damascus’s agreement, and in Iraq over Baghdad’s objections.
  • The Druze area is now labelled Suwayda (Druze) and sits centred on the redrawn pocket, and the SDF label has moved east into the Jazira.
  • The eight Turkish bases along the northern Syrian border — Afrin, Azaz, Al-Bab, Al-Rai, Marea, Jarabulus, Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ain — now appear when Syria is selected. They had been filed under the Syrian National Army, which no longer exists as a separate authority, and so were showing nowhere at all.
  • The American bases in the Kurdish northeast are now marked as former. The United States completed its withdrawal from Syria on 15–16 April 2026, ending more than a decade of presence, and the Syrian government has taken over every site it held. Bases in SDF territory now also list under Syria, matching the way SDF areas colour when Syria is selected.
  • Fixed a bug where clicking a region inside Israel — Area C, the Golan, East Jerusalem and the rest — would not open its panel.
2026-08-11

Foreign bases — Oman and Kuwait additions

  • Added India’s reported listening post at Ras al Hadd, Oman — a signals-intelligence and maritime-surveillance site built after the 2008 India–Oman defence agreement, watching the approaches to the Strait of Hormuz.
  • Added Camp Spearhead at the Port of Shuaiba, Kuwait — the US Army’s main sea port of debarkation in the theatre, where prepositioned stocks and rotational equipment are discharged.
  • Added Camp Virginia, Kuwait as a former base: the V Corps staging camp for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, closed in 2013 when US forces consolidated on Camps Arifjan and Buehring.
  • Added the Bangladesh Military Contingent headquarters at Sabhan, Kuwait — around 6,000 Bangladeshi personnel deployed since 1991, the largest foreign military presence in Kuwait after the United States.
  • Indian and Bangladeshi bases now draw in their national colours on the map instead of the fallback grey.
2026-08-11

Yemen — stale-map fix on Safari

  • Fixed Safari showing the old Yemen borders after the update. The border files are cached by the browser, and Safari was holding on to the previous version — border files are now versioned so a new upload always refreshes.
  • Mukalla and Taiz are no longer coloured as STC cities; both now show as government-held.
2026-08-10

Yemen — borders redrawn

  • The Southern Transitional Council is no longer mapped as a separate territorial authority. Its area has reverted to the internationally recognized Government of Yemen and is now drawn in government green.
  • The pocket in the interior where STC remnants persist is hatched rather than flat-filled, and clicking it opens a dedicated region panel explaining the situation.
  • The STC label has been removed from the map, and the UAE influence overlay no longer covers Yemen.
  • Houthi, AQAP and Yemeni National Resistance boundaries refreshed in the same pass.
2026-07-26

v0.14 — The Cartographer Update

  • True Size mode on every era: pick up any country, faction or historical polity and drag it across the map — it keeps its real size as it moves (Mercator-honest scaling), with ghost outlines, real-area readouts, and cross-era comparisons (drop the Achaemenid Empire over the modern world).
  • Photo Mode rebuilt: the editing Canvas is now a docked side panel on desktop (the map stays live while you edit) and a snap-point bottom sheet on mobile, with tabs reorganized into Paint · Eras · Elements · Labels · Legend · Export.
  • Eras painting: color polities and subregions from 431 BC, 218 BC and the Odyssey directly over the modern map, with full styling (patterns, opacity, outlines, glow).
  • Military bases visualizer in Photo Mode: show every base worldwide, filter by operating nation or host country, or search and pin individual bases.
  • Nation and city labels are now editable inside Photo Mode — recolor or resize all labels at once or click a single one to restyle or remove it.
  • One-click PNG download from the Photo Mode toolbar; region captures now include markers, legend and watermark.
  • Painted colors now render beneath city dots, labels and nation names; new Cities and Labels visibility toggles in the toolbar.

The Odyssey (Mythos)

The Mythos era is a mythic reconstruction of Homer's world — the kingdoms of the Achaeans, the monster-haunted isles, and the animated voyages of Odysseus and Telemachus. Unlike the modern map, nothing here can be “up to date”: every placement is an interpretive choice, and we document all of them.

Charting the Odyssey — the choices behind the route

Why Aeolia is Stromboli, why Circe's island is Monte Circeo cut loose from the mainland, why Ogygia is a custom island at the Pillars of Heracles — every landfall explained, with its degree of certainty.

Open the Odyssey map

Roadmap

Coming soon — the roadmap for upcoming features and planned improvements will be published here.

Data & Sources

A quick walk through where everything on Atlynx actually comes from. The website is brand new and I am constantly refining this section.

Base maps (the underlying imagery)

The dark background you see on the modern map is from CARTO, built on top of OpenStreetMap data. Satellite imagery is from Esri (with Maxar and Earthstar Geographics). The “Earth at Night” and “Blue Marble” styles come from NASA EOSDIS GIBS. The de jure (officially recognized borders) view uses the UN ClearMap.

Country borders (the core of the map)

The base polygons for the world — the outlines of every country — come from publicly available US Department of State data, which is in the public domain. However, they have been strongly altered to match a de-facto view of the world; they do not represent whatsoever the US view of the world. Those alterations are all hand-drawn in QGIS.

Conflict zones and de facto borders

Most frontlines and faction-controlled areas (Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Myanmar, Sahel, CAR, and others) are hand-drawn by me based on slow reading of news, OSINT accounts, and cross-referencing reports. The Russia-Ukraine frontline is originally derived from DeepStateMap.live, a Ukrainian OSINT project that tracks the war with remarkable accuracy — used with attribution under their license, though it has now been modified and altered by my hand-drawing.

When a region's polygons were last redrawn:

  • Yemen10 August 2026
  • Syria24 August 2026
  • Lebanon24 August 2026

Regions not listed here predate this log — their dates will be filled in as each one is next revised.

Historical map (431 B.C.)

All polities, borders, territories, and sub-regions of the ancient world map are hand-drawn from scratch. A full write-up of the scholarly sources and decisions behind these borders is coming soon on this page — it's a long story and deserves its own section. Again, a bit of patience, but don't hesitate to reach out if you are interested and info is not out yet.

Maritime shipping density

The glowing blue/orange shipping lanes on the trade view come from EMODnet — Human Activities (the European Marine Observation and Data Network), built from AIS ship-tracking data provided by CLS (Collecte Localisation Satellites) and ORBCOMM.

Military bases

The foreign military bases data was compiled slowly from publicly available sources — news reporting, think-tank publications (SIPRI, IISS, etc.), official government statements, and OSINT research. It's my own aggregation, but I don't claim original data collection — it's synthesis work.

Fleet positions

Each fleet panel lists its own source directly (news reports, USNI News, official announcements). Positions are approximate and updated periodically.

Country flags

Standard ISO country flags come from the MIT-licensed country-flag-icons library. Flags for non-country entities (factions, alliances, NATO) are custom SVGs assembled from public sources.

Built with

The map itself runs on MapLibre GL and deck.gl for rendering, PMTiles for efficient vector data delivery, and Next.js for the site framework. The font is Geist by Vercel.

Privacy

Plain-English version: Atlynx has no user accounts, doesn't collect personal data, doesn't run analytics, and doesn't set tracking cookies. The only data that exists is the basic server logs every website on the internet collects automatically. Details below.

What I don't collect

No accounts, no email signups, no logins, no profiles, no preferences saved on a server. Nothing about you is stored in a database I control, because there is no such database.

What gets logged automatically

When you visit, the site is served through Cloudflare, which logs the basic technical info every web request carries: IP address, the page requested, the time, your browser's user-agent string, and the referrer. Cloudflare keeps these logs for a short period (their policy, not mine) and uses them to serve the site, mitigate abuse, and protect against attacks. I look at aggregate traffic counts, not individual visitors.

Map tiles and third-party requests

Map data is served from third-party tile providers (CARTO/OpenStreetMap, Esri, NASA, the UN ClearMap) and from Cloudflare R2, where the custom border data lives. When your browser fetches a tile, the request goes to those providers and they may log it on their end. Their privacy policies apply to those interactions — provider links are listed in the Data & Sources section above. None of those requests contain anything beyond standard HTTP info (no name, no email, etc., because I don't have those things to send).

Cookies

I don't set any cookies. I don't run advertising or third-party analytics. Cloudflare may automatically set a single technical cookie (__cf_bm) to distinguish humans from bots and protect the site from abuse — it's a security mechanism, not a tracking cookie, and is described in Cloudflare's cookie documentation. Your browser may also store map tiles in its own cache for performance — that's normal browser behavior and not something I control or read.

Your rights (GDPR / EU users)

Under GDPR you have the right to ask what data is held about you, to request its deletion, and to lodge a complaint with your national data protection authority (in Italy that's the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali). Since I don't hold a database of users, the practical answer is “there's nothing about you to access or delete on my side” — but if you want to confirm or request anything, write to me at [email protected] and I'll respond.

Changes to this policy

If anything changes — for example, if I add a mailing list, accounts, or any analytics tool — I'll update this section and note the change above in Past Updates. Last updated: 25 April 2026.

Get in touch

Have a suggestion, idea, question, or comment? Found something wrong on the map? Want to contribute? Reach out — all feedback is welcome.

[email protected]