The small island tells the story of oil wealth siphoned, culture sidelined, and a landscape steadily militarized in the name of endurance.
Oozing cement has dried around the ancient inscriptions in the rock-cut tombs of Kharg island, the strategic Persian Gulf outpost at the heart of Iran’s current conflict with the United States and Israel. With a maritime history dating back to the region’s earliest civilizations, the island was once a burial site for Palmyrene merchants, who used it as a hub for trade with the various realms that thrived in the Persian Gulf region in the second century B.C. These days, the island displays a different type of wealth, serving as an expo booth for the Iranian regime’s energy and security prowess. Ordinary citizens are prohibited from visiting Kharg, and sources say that most of its tiny civilian population has been evacuated.
“Pointed stake” or “fortified enclosure” are both possible meanings of Kharg’s ancient name by scholarly accounts. Under the direction of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC), the island has been reduced to both of these: a highly guarded garrison that houses the key to the Islamic Republic’s oil revenues as well as a strategic focal point of its military sway over the Persian Gulf.
The island is also a microcosm for Iran under the current regime: Five decades ago, the Islamic Republic took over an industry built by an American oil company under the Pahlavi monarchy, damaged its architectural heritage, displaced its native population, and turned its rich cultural identity into a fortified shell.
For the Islamic Republic, Kharg plays a poignant part in post-revolutionary lore. During the “Tanker War” toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1987-88, the island withstood months of Iraqi bombardment, but the threat of a U.S. takeover of the island ultimately led Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to accept the ‘poisoned chalice’ of a ceasefire.
Since then, the IRGC has prohibited access to the island to anyone other than the small civilian population, military staff and oil workers. Realizing Kharg’s strategic vulnerability, the IRGC has been restructuring the undersea pipelines and slowly diverting oil exports away from the island for decades, a former oil ministry employee who once lived on Kharg told Resanegar, Tehran Bureau’s economic unit. In his view, a U.S. attack on the island in the current scenario won’t have a significant impact on Iran’s energy exports. The IRGC has also moved the island’s entire civilian population off the island, he added.
By other accounts, the regime continues to treat Kharg Island’s residents as hostages to its oil revenue. Iran’s oil workers earn roughly $85-115 per month in base wages, while the government’s own economists say a family needs at least $650 per month to survive. Since the bombardment of the island by the U.S. military earlier this month, Kharg oil workers and engineers repeatedly requested evacuation, according to media reports, but managers denied the request and threatened disciplinary action against anyone who tries to leave. (Tehran Bureau could not independently verify these reports.) As one user observing the situation commented on X, “Workers serve the terminal, the terminal funds the IRGC, and the people are expendable.”
Prisons and rock-cut tombs
The IRGC apparently views not only human capital, but also Kharg’s cultural heritage, as collateral damage. A 2020 analysis by Tehran University scholar A. Heidari points to long-term deterioration and a lack of sustained conservation efforts on the archaeological sites that dot the island. The poor state of preservation and gaps in documentation suggest decades of limited oversight.
These observations are echoed in a video recently circulated on X, in which the speaker visits archaeological sites on Kharg Island and describes their severe neglect. The video takes us to one of the rock-cut tombs dating back to the Parthian dynasty. The site is littered with trash, apparently used by campers and drug users. Layers of cement have recently been slathered over the original masonry forming the roof of the tomb, obscuring the inscriptions on the outer wall. In the west of the island, the video shows the Sasanid-era Nestorian church site and necropolis for which Kharg is archeologically best-known. Here, too, the tops of the masonry have been crudely smoothed over by cement. Across the turquoise water in the background, an off-shore oil pumping station is shown towering against the horizon.
جمهوریاسلامی بلایی سر جزیره خارک آورده که جنگ نتونست بیاره؛ بیرون گور ۲۰۰۰ ساله ساسانی رو سیمان ریختن، داخلشو کردن شیرهکش خونه. تنها کلیسای باقی مانده از دورهٔ ساسانی رو هم کاملا تخریب کردن.
— اریک (@plasticartman2) March 24, 2026
حالا برید برای آهوهای جنگ زده گریه کنید pic.twitter.com/bq80prNVe5
Like most of its oil infrastructure, Kharg’s modern guise as a garrison island was masterminded by the Islamic Republic’s predecessors. In the mid-1950s, the island housed 120 political prisoners along with a population of common criminals, according to Encyclopaedia Iranica, an academic reference. The inmates were “transferred to Kharg from points on the Iranian mainland and other islands such as Qeshm and Hangām, each group living in a separate barrack under the watchful eyes of a military base.”
Much of Kharg Island’s oil infrastructure was originally built under the Pahlavi monarchy with significant American technical and financial support, transforming it into Iran’s primary export terminal, according to Encyclopaedia Iranica. During the Iran–Iraq War, the island was heavily bombed, severely damaging these facilities. In the aftermath, the IRGC and state authorities scrambled to rebuild and restore operations, underscoring the island’s strategic importance.
The Poisoned Chalice
The Iran-Iraq War also brought the moment the Islamic Republic realized that Kharg contained the seeds of both its making and undoing. In the recollection of Ali Hashemi Bahramani—nephew of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then one of the central figures directing Iran’s war effort—the moment was not simply about battlefield losses or diplomatic fatigue. It was about the credible threat that Kharg, the island through which the vast majority of Iran’s oil flowed, could be taken out of the equation altogether. The United States, having entered the Gulf to secure shipping lanes, had made clear that it could, if it chose, strike or even occupy Kharg.
That possibility changed the war. It exposed a structural truth: the war, for all its ideological fervor and human cost, was tethered to a narrow economic lifeline. If Kharg were disabled, Iran’s oil revenues would collapse. If its revenues collapsed, the war would become unsustainable within days.
In Ali Hashemi’s account, this realization was central to Khomeini’s decision to accept the ceasefire. “The U.S. military,” Hashemi later recalled, “not only shot down an Iranian passenger plane, but by threatening military attack and occupation of Kharg Island, placed Ayatollah Khomeini in a position where he accepted the ‘poisoned chalice’ and agreed to Resolution 598.”
Kharg did not end the war, but it made clear that it could not be sustained.