Zarqawi Safe House on Google Earth

Monday, June 12, 2006

Zarqawi Safe House on Google Earth

By Carrick on June 12, 2006 at 04:16 pm

For anybody who's downloaded Google Earth, it's an incredibly cool product from Google for viewing the Earth from space. You can rotate the view, change the angle of view (to mimic the view from a plane). When I pointed it at Iraq, I was amazed with the quality of the images, considering how poorly covered parts of the US are.

The region I was looking at was around Hibhib, Iraq. The images are good enough to resolve cars on the highway in some cases. What I was interested in was whether I could pinpoint this location, which is a screenshot of the military video showing the raid on Zarqawi's safe house:

For those who are interested I believe the safe house is located at 33°48'3.07"N 44°30'48.16"E

And here is my reconstructed view using the Google tools:

Not a perfect match, but then the Google transformations are only approximate, nor did I spend that long trying to match up the perspectives.

Comments

That is cool. It would be interesting to see Zarqawi stomped to death. That is not very nice of me. BUT, he wasn’t very nice…

Zsa Zsa on June 12, 2006 at 05:20 pm

Looks like a pretty damn good matchup to me. Good job.

The video appears to be simply black and white CCD TV since there is no blooming during the initial detonation and shadows are prominent throughout the image. Since it was reportedly an F-16, I presume that Lantirn equipment was used. This is pretty old 1st gen technology. Current airborne staring array imaging technology puts this to shame. Two color infrared and megapixel IR arrays are just around the corner. That will make things even easier to identify accurately.

sammy small on June 12, 2006 at 06:00 pm

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