Hello there! Welcome to the sixth OSINT Challenge of my blog. As usual, below the instructions of the challenge, you will see a “spoiler alert” following which there will be a written walkthrough of how I got to the answer so that you may compare it with yours or so that it may help if you get stuck in the research.

INSTRUCTIONS:

According to the Irrawaddy (a Burmese newspaper), on November 30, 2023, a school was bombed by a Junta airstrike. Can you locate the school?

Click here to go to the article.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Let’s begin.

Since I have some of experience with geolocating in Myanmar, I know that the translated name of the village won’t match the one on google maps. So, my attention was struck more by the name of the town, Taze, and by the fact that the village is supposedly around 19 km away from it. Therefore, after finding out where Taze is (22.945095228994713, 95.37274850731788), I went on Google Earth and drew a circle (just like in Challenge #3) with a radius of 21 km. And here it is:

Ok now we know that the Ywar Shae village (and this is indeed the wrong translation by the way, but it the one we are given) should be inside this circle. Since the translation is wrong, we need to find out the Burmese name of the village. To do so, I looked up the original name of Taze (တန့်ဆည်မြို့) and with it I did a simple google search with a custom date range so that it would find only results published between 29/11 and 01/12.

From the search, I found two articles talking about the bombing of the school (1 and 2) and with the help of the Google Translate extension (if you don’t have it, go immediately to put it because it is extremely helpful and not only for OSINT) I found this name “ရွာရှည်ရွာမှ”. So, I did again another google search with the same date range as before but this time using the name of the village we just found. From the search, I found out that the actual name of the village is “ရွာရှည်(မ)”. But most importantly I found out this facebook post by the Khit Thit Media (another Burmese newspaper). The post is full of pictures which will come extremely handy once we need to verify the location of the school.

When we put the name in Burmese in Google maps, it actually leads us to a school inside the circle I created on Google Earth, and the village is close to the border meaning that it is around 19/20 km away from Taze (that’s some amazing luck). Here are the coordinates: 23.105801965621463, 95.33797559225289.

Based on the shape of the building, we can immediately see that it is already a very good match. However, we need to verify it. To do so, I have taken some of the photos I could find online and circled the details that could help me verify that the school in the picture is indeed the one we need to geolocate. Along with the sources I have already shared, a video on Twitter (link here) was extremely helpful as well.

And here below you can find the satellite view from World Imagery Wayback. I have circled and numbered everything on this image as well so that each one of them corresponds to the ones in the images above. The only thing that we cannot clearly see on satellite is the gate, yet we can assume confidently that the gate is positioned there as the clear paths (created by the continuous walking along those) all lead to the point where according to the images above the gate should be.

As in this case and in many others, trees are extremely helpful for geolocation as they tend to be in the same spot for various years/decades.

I hope you enjoyed the challenge, and thanks for stopping by 🙂