OSINT Exercise 001 walkthrough

I came to know about this interesting website because of an introduction by Ball45.

Challenge INFO

https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/osint-exercise-001/

My Solution

Kiffa is located in Mauritania, and its location can be roughly pinpointed using Google Maps:

The map shows that it is not too far from the equator, so it should follow the general pattern of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west:

Using the pattern of the sun's rise and set along with the hint given about the morning, we can draw the approximate direction based on the shadows:

From the directional map, we can infer the approximate direction of this road.

Additionally, we can see that there are not many paved roads shown on the map, which further narrows down our search area:

We can notice that there are some green trees ahead in the given image, and this leaves us with only one plausible road. We just need to find more key landmarks on the north side of the trees:

We can find a wall, a large tree behind the wall, and a house diagonally opposite the wall. Since these three landmarks correspond to the given place, it should be the actual location:

Therefore, the location in the photo should be at the following coordinates:

16.609430, -11.397806