Between Daesh (ISIS), US airstrikes and grinding civil war, it's easy enough to deduce that the Syrian and Iraqi landscapes have undergone massive changes over the last four years, but it's another thing to watch its development.
Since anti-goverment protests in sparked a brutal crackdown from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, the shifting influences in both Iraq and Syria are often defined by the rise of Daesh. This is, of course, an incredibly simplistic view of the coflicts.
In reality, it's a tangled web of fighting groups who've knocked against each other in both countries, losing, swapping and grabbing territory, day-by-day, for the last four years.
A map appeared on YouTube this week documenting just that, and unsurprisingly, there's a lot more to it than Daesh, Assad or the Kurds. Played over a nine minute video, the data maps out rough lines of territory since March 11, 2011, using the following color codes for each group.
We've put together a GIF to sum up the nine minutes — and the last four years. See it below.
