Visualizing Conflict: The US-Israeli war with Iran in maps, graphics and images

Airstrikes destroy entire blocks and compounds. Missiles soar across borders. Drones rain destruction. People die. 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.

Destruction of the supreme leader’s compound: Before and after

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...