Thick smoke from wildfires burning across Sumatra and Kalimantan has blanketed cities in Indonesia, prompting authorities to intensify aerial firefighting while thousands of residents gathered for a mass Islamic prayer asking for rain.
The scale of the fires
South Sumatra province has recorded the most hot spots nationwide, at 1,429, followed by West Kalimantan (1,226) and Central Kalimantan (811). More than 36,000 hectares have burned across 10 provinces this year, including nearly 94,000 hectares in July alone, much of it peatland that burns for weeks and produces especially dense, lingering smoke.
The rain prayer, and the response effort
In Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra, roughly 3,000 residents performed "salat istisqa," a special prayer for rain, shoulder to shoulder in the courtyard of the governor's office as smoke shrouded the surrounding roads and buildings. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has visited affected areas, pledged additional water-bombing helicopters and oxygen supplies for firefighters, and ordered around 1,000 military and police personnel deployed for prevention efforts. The country has 30 aircraft running water-bombing and cloud-seeding missions over Kalimantan and another 22 helicopters covering Sumatra, dispersing salt particles into clouds to try to induce rainfall.
Regional fallout and accountability
The haze has drifted across borders into Malaysia and Brunei, forcing the closure of nearly 600 schools in Sarawak, Malaysia and affecting roughly 200,000 students; Malaysia has since received permission to conduct its own cloud-seeding operations along the shared border. Indonesian police have arrested 72 people suspected of deliberately starting forest and peatland fires, and four companies are under investigation for allegedly using fire as a cheap method of land clearing.
