Oryx

» see oryxspioenkop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

It started on 16 February 2013 as something two Dutchmen did with their evenings. Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans had both worked with Bellingcat, and Oliemans had been at Janes, the British military intelligence publisher. The name comes from spionkop, Afrikaans for spy hill, which they glossed as a place from where one can watch events unfold around the world. For most of a decade the blog was about Syria, then about the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and it had the readership a specialist hobby site has.

February 2022 changed the size of it. They opened two posts, one for Russian equipment losses in Ukraine and one for Ukrainian, and began filling them with every vehicle whose destruction or capture could be confirmed from a photograph or a video. Each entry linked to the image it came from. Metadata was checked so the same burned hull did not get counted twice under two different uploads. Because only visually confirmed losses were admitted, the totals were understood by everyone who used them to be a floor and not an estimate, which is exactly why they were usable. Forbes called Oryx the most reliable source in the conflict so far. In June 2023 David Petraeus went out of his way to describe the method on camera, photographs with metadata, so that you make sure you don't double-count.

On 19 June 2023 they announced the blog would end on 1 October. The statement said the project had been started a decade earlier out of boredom, had always been done in their free time and without pay, had turned into an all-consuming thing, had not produced a job, and just doesn't make me happy anymore. A longer farewell went up on 15 August. Since late 2021 the writing had felt repetitive. He was tired of the death and the destruction, a whole decade of watching videos of people's bodies having been torn apart by bombs. He mentioned falling asleep holding his phone and waking up on it. The Patreon money had gone to charity rather than to either of them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the method ~

The thing itself was a long web page. Thumbnails in rows, each one a claim with a link under it, sorted by vehicle type and then by what had happened to it, from destroyed at one end to captured intact at the other. No API and no login. If you disagreed with a number you could click through to the photograph the number came from and argue with that instead, which is the whole reason journalists trusted it over anything a ministry published.

I work on computer vision for drones, in Ankara, which means I spend my days on the automated version of this problem: find the object in the frame and be certain you have not already counted it. An entire industry sells that. And the most trusted count of the largest land war in Europe since 1945 was produced by two people opening images by hand and deciding whether a turret in one photo was the same turret as in another. That is not a charming detail about amateurs. It is what verification costs when the answer has to survive being checked.

~ the day it stopped ~

1 October 2023 came and the blog stopped taking new work from its founders. The Ukraine loss lists did not stop: in a follow-up statement they handed them to Jakub Janovsky, a long-time contributor, and to the open-source intelligence group WarSpotting, who committed to running them until the end of the war. Janovsky became the site's administrator. The archive stayed online at its own domain, which is unusual enough to mention, since most of the sites filed here lost their hosting within a year of the last post.

~ the coda ~

There is one entry after the funeral. On 7 December 2024, fourteen months past the declared end, a post went up about the three-day rebel offensive that collapsed the Syrian regime's northern front, written by someone who had spent a decade watching that particular war and clearly could not let that particular week pass without saying something. Nothing has been posted in the twenty-one months since.

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