What to Know About Iran’s Kharg Island

Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Supported by SKIP ADVERTISEMENT 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. Listen · 2:55 min Share full article By John Yoon March 14, 2026, 1:22 a.m. ET 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 Chin...