In a U.S. Defense Department archive, a stack of photographs was once so highly classified that looking at them the wrong way could end a career. Now, they are on a university server, and they have helped solve a mystery that has haunted the Iraqi desert for nearly 1,400 years. According to a 2024 study titled “Locating al-Qadisiyyah: mapping Iraq's most famous early Islamic conquest site,” published in the journal Antiquity, a group of researchers, led by archaeologist William Deadman of Durham University, managed to identify the possible location of an ancient battle that determined the historical fate of an entire region using Cold War-era American spy satellite images. It is a discovery that sounds like the synopsis for a Dan Brown novel.
The battle that nobody could quite locate
