How Google Earth Is Being Used To Call In U.S. Air Strikes Against The Islamic State

The battlefield in Syria where Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi saw fighters using Google Earth, viewed in the app.(Google Earth)

Tim Fernholz, Quartz: How Google is fighting ISIL in Syria

Google—or the many products and services now under the holding company Alphabet—provides the connecting tissue between US forces and Kurdish militias fighting against ISIL in war-torn Syria.

New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi writes from the battlefield that fighters are using Android-powered Samsung tablets and Google Earth to track their battle lines and coordinate close air support with the US military:

“Our comrades can see the enemy moving at the GPS address I just sent you,” [a Kurdish fighter] wrote in Arabic to a handler hundreds of miles away in a United States military operations room. Then he waited for the American warplanes to scream in. The strike that ensued soon after blasted a crater at exactly the coordinates provided by the Kurdish fighter. It left a circle of bodies, including one of an Islamic State fighter who died slumped over his AK-47.

WNU Editor: An eye-opener of a story .... read it all.