What to Know About Kharg Island

 

What to Know About Kharg Island

 

The Persian Gulf island, targeted by U.S. strikes, is home to Iran’s main oil export terminal. Any disruption could jolt global energy markets.

 

John Yoon

By John Yoon

March 14, 2026, 1:22 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/world/middleeast/what-to-know-about-kharg-island.html

 

President Trump said that the U.S. military had conducted a bombing raid on Friday targeting military facilities on Kharg Island, a small landmass in the northern Persian Gulf off the coast of Iran. The island is home to Iran’s main oil export terminal and is critical to the Iranian economy.

 

The operation, a U.S. military official said, targeted storage sites for missiles and mines — assets that U.S. officials had said were being used to block international shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz, at the other end of the gulf. He said that the airstrikes avoided its oil infrastructure.

 

What makes Kharg Island crucial?

About one-third of the size of Manhattan, Kharg Island has facilities that handled about 90 percent of the Iran’s crude oil exports before the war. The deep waters surrounding it provide the necessary clearance for large oil tankers to dock, unlike the shallower depths along the rest of Iran’s Persian Gulf coastline.

 

Iran, one of the world’s largest oil producers, has depended heavily on Kharg Island to export oil by sea since the 1960s. It has storage facilities and pipelines connecting to some of Iran’s largest oil and gas fields. Disrupting its infrastructure would hurt Iran and also affect the global energy market.

 

How busy was it?

In recent years, the terminal has had the capacity to load 10 supertankers at a time for transport across oceans.

 

Three main energy infrastructure sites operate on the island, including Falat Iran Oil Company, considered the country’s largest.

 

China has been the main recipient of the exports, buying the oil through a shadow fleet of tankers that evade the Western sanctions on Iranian oil. Oil exports to China represented about 6 percent of Iran’s economy and were equal to roughly half of the country’s total government spending. Iran provided about 13 percent of China’s oil imports.

 

Has it been hit before?

The last time the island came under significant fire was during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. The Iraqi military, under Saddam Hussein, conducted heavy bombing raids on the island’s oil infrastructure at the time, causing extensive damage. But Iran was able to rebuild the facilities.

 

After the U.S. strikes on Friday, a senior official from Iran’s Oil Ministry said the attacks had been enormous and destructive, and that employees of the oil refineries had reported nearly two hours of nonstop explosions that shook the island like an earthquake.

 

The senior official, who asked not to be named because he was discussing sensitive issues, said that an attack on Kharg Island’s oil and gas infrastructure would immediately halt a major part of Iran’s oil exports.

 

Reporting was contributed by Farnaz Fassihi, Helene Cooper and Liam Stack.

 

John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.