Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time.
The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral.
Habib’s day job revolves around licensing deals and streaming metrics. But during a stretch of increasingly chaotic geopolitical news, he started building a tool to make sense of it. “I’m an engineer by training, and I hold myself to a discipline of continuously learning new technologies regardless of my CEO title,” Habib tells WIRED.
The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.”
Traditional media wasn’t solving the problem he had in mind. “I didn’t need a news aggregator,” he says. “I needed something that showed me how these events connect to each other in real time. The existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large enterprises tens of thousands of dollars annually.”
Treating the massive gap in the market as a weekend challenge, Habib started coding. “I built World Monitor in a single day as a learning exercise,” he says. “The platform you see now reflects maybe five or six total days of development plus community contributions.”
Signals From Everywhere
The platform processes a messy stream of global data, bypassing social media noise to pull facts directly from the source.
“The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously,” Habib notes. The result is a constantly updating map of global tensions: conflict zones with escalation scores, military aircraft broadcasting positions through ADS-B transponders, ship movements tracked through AIS signals, nuclear installations, submarine cables, internet outages and satellite fire detections.
“Everything is normalized, geolocated and rendered on a WebGL globe capable of displaying thousands of markers without frame drops,” Habib says.
The underlying architecture wasn’t built from scratch. Much of it draws on the same principles used to process massive volumes of streaming data.
Handling millions of music streams taught Habib how to build systems that ingest and process information at scale. “I built Anghami and OSN+ data systems and I took a lot of inspiration from the learnings while building this tool,” he says. “It’s obviously very different in nature, but the systems remain the same.” (OSN+ is a Middle Eastern video streaming platform majority-owned by Anghami.)
The real surprise came from the dashboard’s audience. Music-streaming platforms tend to have predictable user patterns. A live geopolitical map attracts something very different: a global—and often obsessive—crowd of watchers. “Building for such a varied audience is hard,” Habib says.
Traffic data shows how widely the platform has spread. The US alone accounts for about 10 percent of users, according to him. While Europe collectively represents roughly 20 percent of traffic, the Middle East and North Africa, he says, contribute 18%. Asia accounts for about 35 percent. “These are surprise numbers,” he says. “ Hence dealing with the users’ queries is going to be very different.”
When the War Hit
Before the missiles started flying, people used the map for very specific reasons. Traders tracked cargo ships to monitor supply chains, while engineers watched power grids and infrastructure networks. “One sports bar runs it on their TVs when there are no games,” Habib says.
But when joint US-Israeli military strikes hit Iran in late February—disrupting maritime logistics and forcing commercial airspace to clear—the platform’s role changed almost overnight.
What had been a curiosity for analysts and hobbyists became a live threat monitor. Casual observers began watching active escalations unfold in real time.
Between early February and the morning the strikes began, the project had recorded just over 1 million unique visitors. By the evening of March 3, that number had passed 2 million. “Every day has been the biggest day since the strikes started,” Habib says.
At one point, the system handled more than 216,000 unique visitors in a single day. But Habib wasn’t just monitoring traffic. He was still writing code.
“During the Iran strikes I had to build fast additions,” he says. “New map layers, Telegram intel retrieval, Hebrew-to-English siren alerts, GPS-jamming detection, airport cancellation feeds, embassy risk advisories.”
Those features were deployed almost immediately, Habib says. “The architecture had to scale in ways I never originally planned for.”
How the Map Verifies Reality
Processing hundreds of live data streams during a military conflict raises a question: How do you verify information fast enough to keep the system moving?
Habib’s answer was to remove human editors entirely. “Zero editorializing,” he says. “No human editor makes a call.”
Instead, Habib says the platform relies on a strict source hierarchy. Wire services and official channels such as Reuters, AP, the Pentagon and the UN sit at the top tier. Major broadcasters including the BBC and Al Jazeera follow, along with specialist investigative outlets such as Bellingcat. In total, he says the system processes about 190 sources, assigning higher confidence scores to more reliable ones.
Software then scans incoming reports for major events and emerging patterns. If multiple credible sources report the same development within minutes, the system flags it as a breaking alert. But headlines alone are not enough.
Because online claims can be unreliable, the platform also looks for physical signals on the ground. It tracks disruptions such as internet blackouts, diverted military flights, halted cargo ships and satellite-detected fires. “A convergence algorithm then checks how many distinct signal types activate in the same geography simultaneously,” Habib says.
“One signal is noise. Three or four converging in the same location is the signal worth surfacing,” Habib says. If an internet outage coincides with diverted aircraft and a satellite heat signature in the same area, the map flags a potential escalation.
Habib acknowledges that removing humans from the loop carries risks. “The multi-tier source-credibility system and convergence algorithm [are a] substitute for editorial judgment,” he says. “Whether that creates blind spots in genuinely novel scenarios, an event with no historical baseline, is a real architectural question the system doesn’t fully resolve.”
Beyond the Map
Habib does not plan for the platform to become a business. “World Monitor started as a personal learning project,” he says. But the experiment quickly grew beyond that. Developers from around the world began contributing code and ideas, helping expand the system’s capabilities.
Now the project is shifting toward a broader goal. “The direction shifts from pure conflict tracking toward broader world signal understanding and acting on these signals,” Habib says.
Instead of simply mapping events after they happen, the platform is increasingly designed to detect patterns before they become headlines, Habib says. “The architecture is moving toward predicting where signals converge before events become news.”
This story originally appeared on WIRED Middle East.
The post How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time appeared first on Wired.
