WarMap Live › How it works

How WarMap Live works

A live map of reported military incidents worldwide, assembled automatically from free public news feeds. No account, no paywall, and every marker links to the article it came from.

1. Free sources only

Every five minutes the site reads 32 public RSS feeds — Al Jazeera, BBC's regional desks, The Guardian, France 24, DW, Euronews, Sky News and the UN peace & security desk, plus outlets close to specific theatres: Ukrinform and Kyiv Post for Ukraine, The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, The New Arab, Anadolu, Middle East Eye and Al-Monitor for the Middle East, SCMP, The Hindu and Dawn for Asia, and Africanews and AllAfrica for Africa. No paid data, no API keys.

TASS and Tehran Times are state-controlled and report claims as fact. They earn their place by covering incidents Western desks never touch, and the design carries the antidote: every marker names its outlet and links the original, so the attribution travels with the claim.

2. A filter, before any AI runs

Most of what these feeds publish is not an armed incident. A headline has to carry a concrete weapon or an armed actor and evidence that something actually happened before it reaches the model — so "fighting kills 12" passes and "peace talks resume" does not. Sport, business, crime and commentary are rejected outright.

3. The model classifies and locates — nothing else

A language model reads each surviving headline, decides whether it describes a specific armed incident at a specific place, and estimates the coordinates, the type and the severity.

It is never allowed to supply a source, an outlet name or a timestamp. Those are copied verbatim from the originating feed entry. Anything it returns that fails validation is discarded rather than repaired, and there is deliberately no seed or sample data — the map stays empty until something real lands on it.

4. An arc is only drawn when the article names an attacker

An arrow from one country to another is a factual claim, so one appears only when the reporting actually names who carried out the strike. Where nobody is named, the incident keeps a plain marker and no arrow. Even then the origin is an attribution, not an observed launch site.

What this is not

• Not verified. There is no reporter, no analyst and no human review between an outlet publishing something and it appearing here.
• Not precise. Coordinates are estimated from a sentence of text and are placed with far more apparent precision than the reporting supports.
• Not complete. An empty area means no monitored feed published a matching report — not that nothing happened. Coverage is uneven by region and by language.
• Not immediate. Timestamps are the article's publication time, which can be hours after the event.

Do not use it for safety, travel, operational, journalistic, insurance or legal decisions. The full disclaimer is in the Terms of Use.

Why the map defaults to six hours

Roughly three incidents an hour reach the map, and they arrive in bursts with a deep overnight lull. Measured across a full day, a third of the individual hours contained no more than one incident — so a one-hour view was frequently a world map with a single pin, telling the truth and looking broken. Six hours is the narrowest window that reliably has something in it. The window is absolute either way: nothing outside it is ever shown, and 1H is one tap away.