Iraq is on fire, and Aram Ismail has no idea how to stanch the flames. As a 12-year veteran of the Iraqi Kurdish forest police, he and his unit are supposed to guard a Long Island-sized slice of rugged wilderness. But the fires are too fierce and too numerous.

Iranian border guards have started scores of blazes along their shared frontier to clear their lines of sight along key cross-border smuggling routes. Turkish airstrikes on militant camps have reduced tracts of forest to cinder. Across the bone-dry mountains and flatlands, a potent combination of illegal logging and naturally occurring wildfires are consuming large chunks of whatever greenery bombs and bullets haven't torched.

On a recent day in Penjwen, the local district