Most conflict maps show who holds what. This one also shows who says so, and whether anyone has verified it. Every marker opens a dated record with its sources, and links to our fact check where we have one.

• Verified: Confirmed by footage that has been geolocated, by a news organisation that says it verified it, or by both sides of the conflict.
• Claimed: Reported by one side or by sources that have not been independently verified. We name who says so.
• Disputed: Sources directly contradict each other.

Areas of control. Each region or state is shaded in the colour of the force that holds most of it. Stripes in two colours mean a second force holds a significant part, usually the countryside while the first holds the towns. Shading is at the level of a whole region, so it shows who holds what, not exact front lines. Stronger shading means verified; paler means claimed.

Satellite imagery. The base layer is high-resolution imagery from Esri and its partners, which is not dated. Sentinel-2 shows the European Space Agency's 10-metre imagery from the pass closest to the selected date; the satellites revisit every two to five days. Burn scan shows the same pass in short-wave infrared, where burned ground and active fires stand out. NASA daily shows a lower-resolution image of the whole region for every day.

Fire detections. Each dot is a 375-metre area that NASA's VIIRS instruments, on three satellites, recorded as unusually hot when they passed over, usually around 1:30 and 13:30 local time. A detection can be a strike, fighting, a burning building or a farmer clearing a field. It is a lead, not proof. The archive updates every six hours.

Tools. 3D drapes the map over elevation data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, with the relief drawn 1.6 times taller than it is so the highlands read at a glance. Theruler measures straight-line distances, so you can check a claim such as “60 km inside Eritrea” yourself.Search looks through our own records first, then OpenStreetMap; you can also paste coordinates. Right-click any point for its coordinates and height, or to compare satellite images of it from before and after the fighting began.

Evidence threads. Click a strike, explosion or other incident and the evidence behind it unfolds around it: on one side, who says so and our fact check; on the other, what the ground shows. That is satellite fire detections from the day before to the day after: within 5 km they are at the site and count as evidence; from 5 to 15 km they are shown as worth checking, since farms and towns burn too. It also lists clear Sentinel-2 passes before and after, footage geolocated by a named source, and other records nearby. Each is marked as found, checkable, looked for and not found, or not checkable (for example, before our fire records begin). On the map, threads run from the evidence to the claim. A claim backed only by reports stays dim.

Before & after lens. Inside the lens is the clearest Sentinel-2 pass from before the date you choose; outside it, the pass for the date selected on the timeline. Comparing with the same day a year earlier removes the change of season: northern Ethiopia turns from green to brown as the rains end in September.

Line of sight. Worked out from the same elevation data as 3D, about 30 metres per point, for a viewer standing 2 metres above the ground, allowing for the curve of the Earth and the usual bending of light. It does not know about trees, buildings or haze. Use it to test whether a video filmed in one place could show another.

Safety. We record places at town level, never exact troop positions, and nothing appears until at least 24 hours after the end of the day it describes.

Credits. Imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics; Copernicus Sentinel-2 data (ESA) served by Esri; NASA GIBS. Terrain: Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS Open Data (SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1). Search: OpenStreetMap contributors, through Photon by komoot. Fire detections: NASA FIRMS (VIIRS, NOAA-20, NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP). Boundaries: geoBoundaries (OCHA, Code for Ethiopia and OpenStreetMap contributors) and Natural Earth. Boundaries are shown for reference and are not an endorsement of any claim.