4 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
world
And though the Amazon is widely de-
scribed as the world’s lungs, a reference
to the forest’s ability to produce oxygen
while storing carbon dioxide, forests
like those in Siberia are as important to
the global climate system as tropical
rainforests.
One reason that arctic wildfires are
particularly concerning is that in addi-
tion to trees and grassland, they also
burn peat, a dirt-like material in the
ground itself that releases much more
carbon dioxide when it burns than do
trees per acre of fire. In the past, peat
fires in northern climates were rare be-
cause of moisture that is now disappear-
ing as the region becomes warmer and
drier.
For reasons of geography, economics,
politics and climate, there is no simple
way to categorize wildfires — each one
is different and may represent a mix of
root causes.
“We have the intentional fires,
through land clearing. We have the fires
that are happening in remote areas that
probably wouldn’t be happening, at
least at this severity, in the absence of
climate change,” Dr. Abatzoglou said.
Around the world, these forces some-
times interact in strikingly different
ways.
THE AMAZON AND INDONESIA
The crisis in the Amazon is an example
of fires’ being set deliberately to clear
forested land for farming or the grazing
of livestock. In Brazil’s case, this is driv-
en by a global demand for soybeans and
cattle, particularly as China has gotten
wealthier and people are more able to
afford meat.
Between 2004 and 2012, deforestation
in the region declined, but that changed
in 2013. Jair Bolsonaro, who last year
was elected Brazil’s president, has
championed the expansion of the farm-
ing industry and has dismissed the idea
of extending protections to indigenous
groups that live in the forest, which has
led to worries that deforestation rates
could further increase.
Early reports suggest that this year’s
burnings, which coincide with the Ama-
zon’s dry season, are poised to worsen,
in part because the United States’ trade
war with China — one of the world’s big-
gest soybean buyers — has driven Bei-
jing to find new suppliers to replace
American farmers. Still, “We don’t know
yet how much area has been actually
burned,” cautioned Laura C. Schneider,
an associate professor in the depart-
ment of geography at Rutgers Univer-
sity.
Indigenous communities in the Ama-
zon have used fire in the rainforests for
generations, though they tend to culti-
vate small areas, plant a relatively di-
verse number of crops and move onto
new plots of land after a few years, al-
lowing the forest to regrow.
“It’s important to mention that they
are able to control those fires. And
again, the unusual thing right now is
that these fires are a little bit out of con-
trol,” said Dr. Schneider.
That is different from what is cur-
rently happening in the Amazon, where
today’s more industrialized agriculture
means that deforested land tends to re-
main permanently cleared. This land
still sometimes burns, however: Farm-
ers will often clear a field for a new crop
by burning the stubble from the previ-
ous crop, and that explains many of the
fires burning now.
A similar pattern is playing out in
Southeast Asia, where 71 percent of peat
forests were lost across Sumatra, Bor-
neo and peninsular Malaysia between1990 and 2015. In many cases the forests
were replaced by farms that produce
palm oil, which is used in products as
varied as cookies and cologne and is one
of the most important crops in the re-
gion.
In 2015, the smog and haze from the
peatland fires were so severe that they
may have led to the premature deaths of
100,000 people, according to a study re-
leased the following year.THE ARCTIC
Even though both involve the burning of
peat, the fires in Indonesia are quite dis-
tinct from what is happening in the
northern reaches of the globe, including
the Arctic. This summer, wildfires broke
out across the region — including
Alaska, Greenland and Siberia.The fires are driven by rising tem-
peratures, which dry out plants and
make them more likely to ignite. Many
researchers describe the heat as a sig-
nal of climate change in a region of the
world that has warmed more quickly
than the rest of the planet.
As these fires have spread, so too
have their carbon dioxide emissions,
which reached their highest levels since
satellite record-keeping began in 2003.
Not only are the fires widely seen as a
signal of climate change, but they can
also exacerbate global warming be-
cause of the soot produced by burning
peat, which is rich in carbon. When the
soot settles on nearby glaciers, the ice
absorbs the sun’s energy instead of re-flecting it, speeding up the melting of the
glacier.CALIFORNIA AND AFRICA
While the fires that struck the Arctic this
summer are unusual, not all wildfires
are so unexpected. In some places, a
seasonal cycle of burning plays a major
role.
The American West is one example.
It is true globally that humans trigger
most wildfires, whether accidentally
with a dropped cigarette or campfire, or
intentionally to clear land. However, one
reason places like California seemingly
have wildfires every year is that the
state, along with much of the West and
Southeastern United States, are what
researchers call fire-adapted ecosys-
tems.
In other words, some landscapes have
evolved over time to not only tolerate
fire, but actually to need it. For instance,
lodgepole pines, a staple tree of the
Western United States, need the heat
from wildfires to release their seeds.
A similar pattern can be seen in some
of the sub-Saharan African fires that
have recently drawn the world’s atten-
tion. According to Dr. Abatzoglou, the
savanna ecosystems just north and
south of Africa’s tropical rainforest burn
fairly predictably, every two to three
years.
“This is really the most fire-prone
ecosystem globally,” he said. “It’s the
right combination of it being wet enough
to have enough fuel and dry enough to
burn, and there’s plenty of lightning.”
Still, climate change can have a dras-
tic effect on wildfires, even in these
parts of the world. For instance, re-
search published this year suggests that
California’s wildfires are 500 percent
larger than they would be without hu-
man-induced climate change.Since July, fire has charred about six million acres of Siberian forest. Fires in the region can worsen global warming because the soot produced by burning peat is rich in carbon.
RUSSIAN FEDERATION FOREST PROTECTION AVIATION SERVICEAblaze from Arctic to tropics
F IRES, FROM PAGE 1
We have fires “that probably
wouldn’t be happening, at
least at this severity, in the
absence of climate change.”A secret cyberattack against Iran in
June wiped out a critical database used
by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
Corps of Iran to plot attacks against oil
tankers and degraded Tehran’s ability to
covertly target shipping traffic in the
Persian Gulf, at least temporarily, ac-
cording to senior American officials.
Iran is still trying to recover informa-
tion destroyed in the June 20 attack and
restart some of the computer systems —
including military communications net-
works — taken offline, the officials said.
Senior officials discussed the results
of the strike in part to quell doubts
within the Trump administration about
whether the benefits of the operation
outweighed the cost — lost intelligence
and lost access to a critical network used
by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards
Corps, an elite division of Iran’s military.
The United States and Iran have long
been involved in an undeclared cyber-
warfare conflict, one carefully calibrat-
ed to remain in the gray zone between
war and peace.
The June 20 strike was a critical at-
tack in that battle, officials said, and it
went forward even after President
Trump called off a retaliatory airstrike
that day after Iran shot down an Ameri-
can drone.
Iran has not escalated its attacks in
response, continuing its cyberopera-
tions against the United States govern-
ment and American corporations at a
steady rate, according to American gov-
ernment officials.
American cyberoperations are de-
signed to change Iran’s behavior with-
out initiating a broader conflict or
prompting retaliation, said Norman
Roule, a former senior intelligence offi-
cial. Because they are rarely acknowl-
edged publicly, cyberwarfare strikes are
much like covert operations, he said.
“You need to ensure your adversary
understands one message: The United
States has enormous capabilities which
they can never hope to match, and it
would be best for all concerned if they
simply stopped their offending actions,”
Mr. Roule said.
Cyberoperations do not work exactly
like other conventional warfare. A
cyberattack does not necessarily deter
future aggression in the same way a tra-
ditional military strike would, current
and former officials say. That is in part
because cyberoperations are hard to at-
tribute and not always publicly ac-
knowledged by either side, a senior de-
fense official said. Yet cyberoperations
can demonstrate strength and show
that the United States will respond to at-
tacks or other hostile acts and imposecosts, the official said.
The United States Cyber Command
has taken a more aggressive stance to-
ward potential operations under the
Trump administration, thanks to new
congressional authorities and an execu-
tive order giving the Defense Depart-
ment more leeway to plan and execute
strikes.
The head of the command, Gen. Paul
M. Nakasone of the Army, describes his
strategy as “persistent engagement”
against adversaries. Operatives for the
United States and for various adversar-
ies are carrying out constant low-level
digital attacks, said the senior defense
official.
The strike on the Revolutionary
Guards’ intelligence group diminished
Iran’s ability to conduct covert attacks, a
senior official said.
The United States government ob-
tained intelligence that officials said
showed that the Revolutionary Guards
were behind the limpet mine attacks
that disabled oil tankers in the Gulf May
and June, although other governments
did not directly blame Iran. The mili-
tary’s Central Command showed some
of its evidence against Iran one day be-
fore the cyberattack.
The White House judged the strike as
a proportional response to the downing
of the drone — and a way to penalize
Tehran for destroying crewless aircraft.
The database targeted in the cyber-
attacks, according to the senior official,
helped Tehran choose which tankers to
target and where. No tankers have been
targeted in significant covert attacks
since the June 20 cyberoperation, al-
though Tehran did seize a British tanker
in retaliation for the detention of one of
its own vessels.
Though the effects of the June 20 cy-
beroperation were always designed to
be temporary, they have lasted longer
than expected and Iran is still trying to
repair critical communications systems
and has not recovered the data lost in
the attack, officials said.
Officials have not publicly outlined
details of the operation. Air defense and
missile systems were not targeted, the
senior defense official said, calling me-
dia reports citing those targets inaccu-
rate.
In the aftermath of the strike, some
American officials have privately ques-
tioned its impact, saying they did not be-
lieve it was worth the cost. Iran proba-
bly learned critical information about
the United States Cyber Command’s ca-
pabilities from it, one midlevel official
said.
A cyberweapon, unlike a conventional
weapon, can be used only a few times, or
sometimes even just once. Targets can
find the vulnerability used to get access
to their networks, then engineer a patch
to block that opening.U.S. cyberattack disruptsIran attacks on oil tankersWASHINGTONBY JULIAN E. BARNESIran’s Revolutionary Guards (front) and a British tanker. Officials say a cyberattack in
June wiped out a database used by Iran to plot attacks on Persian Gulf oil traffic.HASAN SHIRVANI/MIZAN NEWS AGENCY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESlaunching an explosives-laden drone
into Israel.
The drone blast near Beirut early
Sunday destroyed what Israeli officials
described as machinery vital to Hezbol-
lah’s precision-missile production effort.
Israel’s responsibility for that strike, the
aim of which was first reported by The
Times of London, was confirmed by two
officials briefed on the operation.
In Iraq, bases belonging to Iranian-
backed paramilitary groups have been
attacked repeatedly in recent weeks,
and their leaders have accused Israel,
saying Israeli drones had hit their vehi-
cles in Qaim, killing one commander. Is-
rael carried out at least one of the at-
tacks, on a base north of Baghdad on
July 19, and American officials have said
that Israel carried out others.
On Wednesday, the Lebanese Army
said it had fired on two of three Israeli
drones that breached Lebanese
airspace before returning to Israel.
The flare-ups highlight how Iran’s op-
portunistic expansion in much of the
Middle East is coming up against fierce
Israeli pushback.
“The military theater has been broad-
ened by Israel in terms of the targeting
of its attacks,” said Randa Slim, an ana-
lyst at the Middle East Institute in
Washington. “It is no longer about Irani-
an presence in Syria. It is about Iran’s
network in the region.”
For years, as unrest and conflict have
weakened Arab states, Iran has moved
in, building strong ties with local forces
that benefit from its patronage while ex-
panding its influence and amplifying the
threat to Israel.
Iran pioneered this approach by
building Hezbollah into Lebanon’s most
formidable military force, with tens of
thousands of trained fighters and an ar-
senal believed to contain over 100,
rockets and missiles pointed at Israel.
More recently, Iran has strengthened
its regional network by providing arms
and expertise to the Houthi rebels in
Yemen, militias in Iraq and pro-govern-
ment forces in Syria. Iran has also
strengthened cooperation between its
allies: Hezbollah operatives from Leba-
non have trained fighters in Iraq and
Yemen and sent aid to Palestinian jihad-ist movements, and Iran has airlifted
thousands of militiamen from Iraq and
elsewhere into Syria to help President
Bashar al-Assad defeat a rebellion.
The lives of the two militants killed by
the Israeli strike in Syria over the week-
end illustrate the borderless nature of
the Iranian network. The fighters, Has-
san Zabeeb and Yasser Daher, grew up
in Lebanon, studied aviation engineer-
ing in Iran and returned to Lebanon to
work with Hezbollah, according to Leba-
nese news media.
Iran calls its regional network the
“axis of resistance.” While its membersoperate with significant autonomy in
their own countries, they share the
broader goal of combating American, Is-
raeli and Saudi influence in the Middle
East. Having militarized allies across
the region also serves as a deterrent
against Israeli and American strikes on
Iran, since any such attacks could elicit
violent responses elsewhere.
Israel’s efforts to hinder Iranian ex-
pansion in recent years have focused
largely on Syria, where Israel has car-
ried out more than 200 airstrikes since
early 2017 on suspected weapons con-
voys, bases and other sites associated
with the Iranian war effort.
Israel mostly avoided killing Hezbol-
lah fighters in Syria and attacking inside
Lebanon, which could have provoked
counterstrikes. This led to an unwritten
understanding about where and how
their conflict would play out. The attacks
last weekend appeared to break the
rules by killing two Hezbollah fighters in
Syria and reaching into the heart of a
Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut.
Raising temperatures further are
brash public statements on both sides,
which seem intended as much for do-
mestic audiences as for each other.
Israel’s military has taken to taunting
its adversaries on social media: After
the airstrike in Syria, it ridiculed Gen-
eral Suleimani.
On Tuesday, it established a Twitter
account in Persian to try to undermine
him with the Iranian public.
Addressing his followers over the
weekend, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader
of Hezbollah, vowed to retaliate, shout-
ing his determination to prevent attacks
in Lebanon from becoming frequent.“We in the Islamic resistance, we will
not allow for this type of path, no matter
the cost!” he said. He did not say how or
when his forces would respond.
“I suggest to Nasrallah to calm down,”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel responded mockingly on Tuesday.
“Israel knows how to defend itself and to
pay back its enemies. I say the same to
Qassim Suleimani: be careful with your
words and even more so with your ac-
tions.”
Some analysts suggested that the ap-
proaching Israeli election encouraged
Mr. Netanyahu’s tough stance, while Mr.
Nasrallah also could not appear to be
weak at a time when American sanc-
tions have hurt his group’s finances.Talal Atrissi, a sociologist who studies
Hezbollah at Lebanese University, said
he expected the group to retaliate
against Israel to prevent attacks in Leb-
anon from becoming commonplace.
Alluding to Israel’s national elections
on Sept. 17, he added: “There are elec-
tions, and Netanyahu needs to show
that he is protecting Israel, but if there is
no response, he’ll keep doing it. It won’t
just be the election. It will become a new
strategy.”
Officials and analysts said the recent
uptick in strikes, and their spread into
Iraq and Lebanon, came in response to
adjustments to Iran’s strategy.
One involved General Suleimani’s ef-
forts to maintain supply lines for ship-ments of arms and equipment from Iran.
Until about a year ago, according to a
senior Middle Eastern intelligence offi-
cial, Iran used unmarked or Iranian
commercial planes flying into the Da-
mascus airport to reach Hezbollah or
Quds Force units in Syria.
But repeated Israeli airstrikes drove
Iran to reroute supplies through air-
fields in northern Syria instead.
When Israel struck those fields, too,
General Suleimani moved to set up a
land route from Iran through Iraq,
where drivers and vehicles are often
changed to elude surveillance, before
crossing into northern Syria.
The Israeli attack on July 19 at Amerli
base, north of Baghdad, struck a ship-
ment of guided missiles bound for Syria.
It was the first time Israel had carried
out an airstrike in Iraq since it destroyed
a nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981,
when Saddam Hussein was in power.
Israel has tried to prevent Hezbollah
from manufacturing its own precision-
guided missiles since early 2017, using a
combination of disclosures, warnings
and threats, Israeli analysts say.
Prevented from military action by its
understanding with Hezbollah and a de-
sire to avoid war, Israel at first tried to
weaponize its intelligence gathering,
hoping that exposing Hezbollah’s mis-
sile project as a threat to regional securi-
ty would create international pressure
to quash it.Israel counters Tehran over arms, escalating shadow war
I SRAEL, FROM PAGE 1
Lebanese intelligence agents at the site of a drone attack near a Hezbollah office outside
Beirut. Israeli officials said it destroyed machinery used to produce precision missiles.NABIL MOUNZER/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCKDavid M. Halbfinger reported from Jeru-
salem; Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Leba-
non; and Ronen Bergman from New
York. Farnaz Fassihi contributed report-
ing from New York.Israel has taunted its adversaries
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