Thomas van Linge’s colorful, detailed maps showing which parties control which parts of Iraq, Libya and Syria are a hit whenever he posts them on Twitter. They have been cited on news stories in the Huffington Post, Lebanon’s Daily Star and Vox, as well as on the University of Texas at Austin’s website. But van Linge isn’t a policy expert and he’s never been to the region: In fact, he’s just a Dutch high school student who tracks the war on social media. 
 
 Van Linge, who goes by @arabthomness on Twitter, has amassed nearly 11,000 followers since joining the platform in January 2013, the year he published his first map. Many of his followers work for influential think tanks or suggest policy for the region he maps. 
 
 Van Linge’s latest map of conflict-ridden Syria, updated June 5, 2015, illustrates just how complex the situation in the country has become. In northeastern Syrian Kurdistan, a tip of yellow is mainly in control of the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units), while the country’s west is a mix of red—representing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—and varied green blotches representing the Free Syrian Army and mixed rebel and jihadi-controlled countryside. The city of Aleppo is a palette of colors representing myriad forces like Jabhat al-Nusra, Islamic Front and government soldiers vying for power, making normal life for civilians a deadly struggle. 
 
 The rest of Syria is a vast swath of countryside, colored gray, controlled by the militant group Islamic State (ISIS), and punctuated with black circles denoting ISIS-controlled towns and cities. The map is corroborated by news reports from last month that say ISIS now controls around 50 percent of Syria. 
 
 Thomas Van Linge/Newsweek 
 
 “I want to inform people mostly and show people the rebel dynamics in the country,” Van Linge told Newsweek, referring to his motivation for creating his maps. “I also want to inform journalists who want to go to the region which regions are definitely no-go zones, which regions are the most dangerous, and also to show strategic developments through time.” 
 
 Van Linge’s interest in the region was first sparked by the events of the 2011 Arab Spring, particularly the Egyptian revolution. He started following trends in Libya and Syria and made his first map showing the situation for the YPG and Kurdish forces in Syrian Kurdistan in December 2013. Then someone asked him to make a map of Syria as a whole. 
 
 “I hadn’t really considered it at the time, but I was annoyed by other maps that didn’t make the distinction between rebels and ISIS groups of areas, which were still at the time intertwined,” he said. In the past 16 months, he’s also made maps of Eastern Ukraine, Somalia, the Palestinian territories and the northern part of Mali, which saw fighting between Al-Qaeda and Tuareg rebels, although the Syria maps get the most attention. 
 
 When he starts a new map, which usually takes several weeks to finish alongside his schoolwork, Van Linge takes a large file of a blank map and uses the most humble of tools to start coloring it in: Microsoft Paint. 
 
 “I’m not very sophisticated with computers,” he said. 
 
 Thomas Van Linge/Newsweek 
 
 The sources for Van Linge’s maps include Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, as well as personal contacts in the region, including within the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo and others in the Kurdish region north of Aleppo. He estimates he has around 1,000 sources for all his maps, which he uses to corroborate claims of territorial control. 
 
 “When I see, for example, a status update of a rebel group on Facebook in which they claim they’ve captured a small village, then I usually wait until either other sources report it or footage from rebels within that village shows up on YouTube before I make the edit on my map,” said Van Linge. 
 
 He then uses a map tool on Google Earth to make and edit shapes of controlling territories, like the mint green boomerang shape showing a low amount of rebel-controlled countryside in southwestern Syria, which he replicates in the Paint file. 
 
 The finished product is shared on Twitter and is often retweeted several times. Pieter Van Ostaeyen, the Belgian jihadist expert described by the Financial Times as an “armchair terrorist tracker,” has also started republishing the maps on his website. 
 
 Despite Van Linge’s age and relative inexperience in the world of foreign affairs, some Middle East experts have applaud his maps. Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said he finds the maps “among the most useful,” mainly due to the color blocking system employed by Van Linge. Most mapmakers, Landis says, use “spindly strands of highway control” to show the areas run by ISIS, which might underestimate the group’s power. 
 
 “Controlling large swaths of desert, where few people live, is strategically important. No one would make a map of Algeria or Saudi Arabia like this, only ISIS,” said Landis. “By updating his maps frequently and sticking to tradition by trying to depict how much actual territory ISIS controls, Thomas van Linge does us all a favor.” 
 
 Rana Khalaf, a researcher at the Centre for Syrian Studies at St. Andrews University, also found the maps useful, but said it would be helpful to highlight the uninhabited desert regions, as well as to use intersecting lines to show contested areas where control can change overnight. 
 
 Van Ostaeyen, who publishes Van Linge’s maps but primarily uses Twitter to track and communicate with jihadists, also spoke of how helpful the maps are. 
 
 “I found it really interesting to see the evolution of everything going on,” he said. “Thomas’s maps are one of the best published on what’s going on in Syria and Iraq.” 
 
 At the start of their correspondence, Van Ostaeyen didn’t know Van Linge’s age and was impressed when he found out he was a teenager. He wasn’t, however, surprised. 
 
 “I’ve seen so many weird things, like the Shami Witness case [Van Ostaeyen was in close contact with Mehdi Masroor Biswas, the man behind the pro-ISIS account, who was arrested in Bangalore, India, last December], that I can’t be surprised anymore by something,” said Van Ostaeyen. 
 
 Van Linge’s Twitter feed is more than just maps: it’s also a valuable resource for news of ongoing humanitarian crises in the region and around the world. He posts photos of the aftermath of shelling and retweets activists who post graphic photos of children killed by weapons in Syria. He says he does this to raise awareness now that the international media is largely ignoring daily bomb attacks. 
 
 “By tweeting every bombardment, every victim of the Assad regime or ISIS, I believe you’re reminded of these crimes, these events,” said Van Linge. “They’re ongoing everyday even though they don’t make headline news anymore.” ||||| Islamic State fighters have conquered Rahabi in Iraq. They control the Libyan coast near Sirt. In Syria, they just lost Tall Abyad to the Kurds, but are spreading out in the center of Palmyra. Thomas van Linge is keeping an eye on their movements. The 19-year-old wears a hoodie and, although he only just graduated from high school, he already knows better than most people where the Jihadists are heading, which areas they are occupying and where they've been beaten back. That's because van Linge makes some of the world's best maps of chaotic war zones from the desk of his childhood bedroom in Amsterdam. He has never been to Syria, Iraq or Libya, and he learned Arabic on YouTube. 
 
 The young Dutchman isn't just keeping an eye on Islamic State and its "caliphate," he also knows what the rebels of the Free Syrian Army, al-Nusra Front and Lebanon's Hezbollah are doing. In Libya he's monitoring the Zintan Brigades, in Nigeria he's watching Boko Haram, in Eastern Ukraine he's keeping an eye on the separatists. "All places where people are rising up," he says. 
 
 His maps have been used by CNN, the New York Times and even SPIEGEL. The question is: Why is a 19-year-old interested in the situation at Syrian front lines? And how does he manage to depict these conflicts so precisely, with more details than almost any other professional cartographer? 
 
 Thomas van Linge still lives at home, in a small house near Schiphol Airport, where Star Wars DVDs line the shelves. When he looks out the window, he can see hazelnut bushes and a slide in his front yard. He shrugs with his shoulders -- he has no answer to the question. He's a practical person and believes that everyone should just do what interests them. Afraid of failing at something? No, he says. He claims not to know that feeling. 
 
 At school he did theater. He learned the anthroposophical movement art known as eurythmy and completed an internship in a home for senior citizens. He has collected money for species in danger of extinction and memorized the names of all the birds and mammals of central Europe. He attended a school called the Free School, a Waldorf institution where lessons follow the principles of Rudolf Steiner. One of the ideas of these progressive educators is that students shouldn't only be made to learn how to think and feel, but also how to want -- i.e., how to do things. 
 
 Moving into the Real World 
 
 One evening four years ago, van Linge saw a show on CNN about the Arab Spring in Egypt. He saw furious young people fighting for their freedom on Tahrir Square in Cairo. His mother is a psychologist, his father an economist, and they raised him to be a free thinker who views the world as a place of promise. He says he often wished that others were as free as him. 
 
 So he selected the Syrian civil war as the subject for his specialized work at school. He looked up a map of Syria on Google and began inputting front lines and rebel groups. He used different colors. He established contact with activists and gained their trust. They, in turn, sent him information. Then he continued tinkering with the map. In January 2014, he released it for the first time on his Twitter account, @arabthomness. Now he has over 14,000 followers from around the world. He regularly updates the maps. 
 
 A flood of information flows together on his mobile phone from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. He Skypes with fighters on the front, corresponds with activists and charities and even gets messages from other cartographers. In all, he claims to use over 1,100 sources for his Syrian maps. 
 
 Now that he is finished with high school, van Linge has been doing a lot of thinking about what he should do next. He says he's like to work freelance, be outside and travel. During his research he learned about a young Syrian whose parents died. She now needs to take care of her little sister alone. Thomas van Linge often thinks about the two. He knows, he says, that his maps don't help the girls. 
 
 That has inspired him to think about traveling to one of the places soon he so far has only known from his maps -- possibly into the Kurdish region in northeastern Iraq. He believes he's spent enough time monitoring the situation from afar. He feels that it's now time for him to help people where their suffering is actually taking place. ||||| Rating is available when the video has been rented. 
 
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– Thomas van Linge has become one of the most respected cartographers around when it comes to tracking global conflicts, including the advances of ISIS, Boko Haram, and separatists in Ukraine. His highly detailed, color-coded maps have been picked up by CNN, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post, among other media—and the 19-year-old creates them all from his childhood bedroom in Amsterdam, reports der Spiegel. Yes, 19. And the young activist has never even been to any of the war-torn regions he documents and taught himself Arabic on YouTube. "I want to inform people mostly and show people the rebel dynamics in the country," he told Newsweek in June. "I also want to inform journalists who want to go to the region which regions are definitely no-go zones, which regions are the most dangerous, and also to show strategic developments through time." How did a Dutch teen get to become one of the foremost armchair cartographers in the world? He tells Newsweek his interest was sparked while watching 2011's Arab Spring uprising, which spurred him to start following what was going on in Syria. He released a map in 2014 of that region on his Twitter account, which now boasts more than 15,000 followers who retweet his creations. Each map, which he colors in using Microsoft Paint, takes van Linge a few weeks to finish, using social media, YouTube, and any of his 1,000-plus sources on the front lines to gather and corroborate information, he tells the magazine. What's next for van Linge? He's contemplating heading to one of the far-off lands he's been mapping out to help the people suffering there in person, Spiegel notes. Check out a Syria territory progression video using van Linge's maps here. (Or click to read about a much-mapped island that doesn't actually exist.)