President Donald Trump said that the US 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 US military official said, targeted storage sites for missiles and mines — assets that US 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.
About one-third the size of Manhattan, Kharg Island has facilities that handled about 90 per cent of 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 per cent of Iran’s economy and were equal to roughly half of the country’s total government spending. Iran provided about 13 per cent 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 US 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.
The other Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf up to the Strait of Hormuz are Abu Musa, the Greater and Lesser Tunb, and Qeshm Island. All these islands carry outsized importance because of their oil facilities and strategic location.
Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunb have long been a front line in tensions between Iran and Gulf states allied with the US.
Iranian forces seized the three tiny islands in November 1971, days after the United Kingdom withdrew from the Gulf and just before the sheikhdoms joined to form the United Arab Emirates. Iran maintains military assets and garrisons on the islands.
Qeshm Island is the largest island in the Persian Gulf. It sits near the Strait of Hormuz and is home to about 1,50,000 residents. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said the US struck a desalination plant on the island on March 8 — a claim not acknowledged by Washington.
The desalination plant supplies water to about 30 villages.
New York Times News Service and AP