KHARG ISLAND — The United States struck military facilities on Kharg Island on March 13, 2026. After the March 13 strikes, President Donald Trump said the strikes destroyed everything on the island except for the area where the oil is.

On March 30, Trump threatened to completely obliterate Kharg Island if Tehran did not reach a deal to end the ongoing war with the U.S. and Israel. The island serves as Iran's primary oil export hub, with some 90 percent of the country's oil exports shipped from there, mostly to China, using infrastructure built under Iran's last Shah.

Kharg Island lies 31 kilometers off the coast of mainland Iran. The island was selected to become Iran's primary oil export hub because of its deep surrounding waters and relatively calm seas, which allow massive oil tankers to dock off the island and load Iranian crude before sailing south through the Strait of Hormuz to global oil markets.

The oil infrastructure on the island includes underwater pipelines that funnel oil approximately 37 kilometers from the Iranian mainland. Storage tanks on the island can hold up to one million barrels of crude oil each. The island's geography allows oil to flow downhill into tankers by gravity without complex pumping systems.

In the 1970s, a sea island was completed off the western coast of Kharg Island, allowing the largest oil tankers to be loaded through submarine pipelines. The western dock was constructed in water deep enough to handle the largest fuel tankers in existence. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, facilities on the island that were partly run by American oil company Amoco were taken over by Iran's new rulers. In 1990, Tehran paid more than half a billion dollars in compensation to Amoco for the seizure of the oil infrastructure and several offshore drilling fields.

The island's oil facilities have been targeted before. In 1984, Iraqi strikes on the oil facilities during the Iran-Iraq conflict escalated the tanker war, in which both sides attacked vessels carrying the other's oil. Through the 1980s, the Iraqi Air Force destroyed most of the facilities on the island.

After repairs following the Iran-Iraq War and expansion of facilities, the oil hub offloaded around 1.5 million barrels of oil each day, a volume worth about $172 million at April 2026 prices. Around 8,000 people live on Kharg Island as of early 2026, and the island is tightly guarded by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.