The small island tells the story of oil wealth siphoned, culture sidelined, and a landscape steadily militarized in the name of security.
Oozing cement has dried around the ancient inscriptions in the rock-cut tombs of Kharg Island, the strategic Persian Gulf outpost that could take center stage in Iran’s war 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 polities that thrived in the Gulf region in the second century BC. These days, the island displays a different type of wealth, exhibiting the Iranian regime’s energy infrastructure and security reach. Ordinary citizens are prohibited from visiting Kharg, and it appears that all 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 heavily guarded garrison seen as holding 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 of 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 most of its native population, and interred its rich cultural identity within a fortified shell.
For the Islamic Republic, Kharg plays a poignant part in postrevolutionary 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 US 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 its few civilian residents, military personnel, 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 US attack on the island at this point would not have a significant impact on Iran’s energy exports. He added that the IRGC has relocated Kharg’s entire civilian population to the mainland.
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 US military’s bombardment of the island earlier this month, Kharg oil workers and engineers repeatedly requested evacuation, according to media reports, but were rebuffed by administrators, who have threatened disciplinary action against anyone who tries to leave. (Tehran Bureau could not independently verify these reports.) As one observer 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 Ahmad Heidari points to long-term deterioration of the archaeological sites that dot the island and a lack of sustained conservation efforts. 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 left 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 Kharg’s best-known archeological site: the remnants of a Sasanid-era Nestorian church and necropolis. Here, too, the tops of the masonry have been crudely smoothed over by cement. Across the azure water in the background, an offshore oil pumping station towers against the horizon.
Like most of its oil infrastructure, Kharg’s modern role as a garrison island was established by the Islamic Republic’s predecessors. In the mid-1950s, as described by the academic reference Encyclopaedia Iranica, the island housed 120 political prisoners along with a population of common criminals. 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. After each wave of bombing, 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 realization that Kharg Island contained the seeds of the Islamic Republic’s potential undoing. In the recollection of Ali Hashemi Bahramani—nephew of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then one of the central figures directing Iran’s war effort—this realization centered on the credible threat that Kharg, 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: Iran’s part in the conflict, for all its ideological fervor and seemingly limitless human cost, was tethered to a narrow economic lifeline. If Kharg were disabled, Iran’s oil revenues would collapse. If those revenues collapsed, the country’s capacity to fight would crumble within days.
In Ali Hashemi’s account, this understanding was central to Khomeini’s decision to accept the ceasefire. “The US 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.”
The threat to Kharg did not end the Iran-Iraq War, but it made clear that the war could not be sustained.