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On March 13, the U.S. military carried out a bombing attack on Iran’s Kharg Island, targeting military and naval facilities that protect the island’s strategic oil hub. The small coral island, a remote outpost off Iran’s southwestern coast in the Persian Gulf, is the primary terminal through which nearly all of Iran’s oil exports pass and a strategic location in the ongoing U.S.–Israel war on Iran. The island’s significance is further compounded by its role as a major energy infrastructure site, where supertankers load and transport crude oil to global markets through the Strait of Hormuz. With the possibility of a U.S. military seizure or blockade, the geopolitical significance of Kharg has now reached the headlines of a war that is increasingly becoming a regional conflict.
Yet to view Kharg through its military and economic functions is to reproduce the very violence that war reporting performs. Media coverage of war often flattens history and human life. The French philosopher Paul Virilio famously argued that modern warfare operates through the “logistics of perception,” in which the control and organization of vision become central to the conduct of war (1–5). The military onslaught on Kharg Island is no exception. Through a securitized discourse, Kharg is reduced to a geostrategic site of visibility, as its existence is rendered legible to distant audiences, while the histories and lived worlds that shape it recede from perception. What disappears is the island itself as a historically layered site: a quiet node in the maritime networks of the Persian Gulf where people, goods, and ideas have circulated for centuries.
As a scholar interested in the cultural and religious life of the Persian Gulf, I have spent years studying the port city of Bushehr, located roughly twenty-five kilometers (about fifteen miles) from Kharg Island. I have come to learn about Kharg as an island within the complex network of maritime trade, fishing communities, religious traditions, and ecological diversity that make the Persian Gulf a historically layered, interconnected zone of circulation, memory, and life. Yet despite its historical importance, Kharg has remained a largely inaccessible part of that region. During several periods of fieldwork in Bushehr, I was never able to visit the island itself, largely because of the sensitive military installations and the heavy security surrounding Iran’s most important oil export terminal, whose strategic significance has only grown in the ongoing war.
The inability to visit a place can stir the imagination. In mine, despite the burden of its infrastructures, Kharg appears as a stark yet beautiful coral island, rising from turquoise waters—a desolate yet living terrain, its sparse vegetation shaped by the arid winds and salt-laden air of the Persian Gulf. On Kharg, I imagined a sensory rawness, suspended between geological formation and exposure.
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This imagined arid landscape is far from empty; it is instead rooted in a longer human history. For most of its history, the island was inhabited by mixed Arab and Persian fishing communities whose cultural life followed the rhythms of the Persian Gulf. Such communities relied on the surrounding seascape—its intensely blue waters shaped by desert winds—and participated in longstanding networks of commerce and pilgrimage that connected the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the wider Indian Ocean. Beneath today’s oil infrastructure and military landscape lie ancient trade routes, maritime communities, and traces of religious life.
Shaped by layered genealogies, islands are capacious sites of spirituality. Likely dating to late antiquity, Zoroastrian funerary sites on the island point to an earlier cosmology in which the earth was treated as sacred and inviolable, protected from the contamination of the dead. In the early Islamic period, a large eastern Christian monastery served as a center of learning and devotion, embedded in maritime networks and the region’s social and economic life. In the modern period, the Danish-German cartographer Carsten Niebuhr, who traveled through the Persian Gulf during the Danish Arabia Expedition in the 1760s, recorded among the earliest European observations of Shiʿi mourning rituals commemorating the tragedy of Karbala—the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn in 680. Such devotional practices formed part of a wider culture of mourning that would later develop into the popular dramatic ritual performances known as taʿziyeh, still performed in Iran today (Rahimi, Senses of Mourning, 55–57).
In the 1960s, Kharg saw a dramatic ecological transformation under the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1945–1979). In these critical years of rapid development, the island was transfigured into Iran’s principal oil export terminal, serving what scholars describe as an extraction zone within a broader network of fossil-fuel frontiers. For much of the late Pahlavi period, the island underwrote the expansion of state capitalism, supported by the United States through military alliances and strategic integration into Cold War energy and security networks.
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Upon approaching Kharg Island by air in 1960, the Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad wrote: “… at the far edge of my vision, there was a long, dark patch upon the surface of the water, where the emerald of the sea met the faded blue of the sky.” (Jazira-ye Kharg: Dorr-e Yatim-e Khalij-e Fars, 21). For Al-e Ahmad, whose travels to rural areas and provinces across the country in the 1950s and 1960s sought forms of existence not fully reshaped by industrialization, the island appeared as a dark interruption: a site not fully transformed, not yet absorbed into expanding infrastructures. Yet this initial perception quickly gives way to a starkly different scene: his account of the rapid transformation of the coral island, which records the major processes of modernization underway in Iran, a period during which oil industry infrastructure and fossil fuel transportation expanded across the Persian Gulf. Upon arriving on the island and encountering this transformation, he ominously observed that “Kharg was being swept away by large bulldozers,” as homes and palm groves were demolished and cleared to make way for airfields, loading docks, dormitories, and tennis courts—alongside extractive oil infrastructure—thereby foregrounding the rapid transformation of the island’s landscape in the service of petro-industrial development (Jazira-ye Kharg, 12–13).
Here, the notion of the island being “swept away” serves as a metaphor for an extractive economy in which life around oil infrastructure is erased under exploitative regimes of labor and fossil capital. In his account, Al-Ahmad also registers the emergence of a visual regime, as he describes derricks and smokestacks as the “coarse, unadorned minarets of the massive temple of the age of machines and oil,” suggesting that petro-industries do not merely reconfigure land but also the very horizon of perception (Al-e Ahmad, Jazira-ye Kharg, 20). In an epistemic context, extraction is not merely economic development but the colonization of the sensory lifeworld, reorganizing how life is perceived and inhabited while accelerating the conversion of land and the biosphere into surplus value. For Al-e Ahmad, this acceleration on the island, captured in his characterization of Kharg as an “orphan pearl,” reveals a paradox: a place central to economic life yet socially abandoned, estranged from the very life it sustains.
Following the 1979 revolution, such lifeworlds were further reconfigured, as the island remained a vital extractive and strategic location for the new revolutionary state. During the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), it became a frequent target of Iraqi attacks in the so-called Tanker War, yet it continued to function as the Islamic Republic’s most important oil export hub. In the decades since, Kharg has remained a crucial geopolitical node as Iran has navigated successive waves of U.S. sanctions targeting the country’s oil sector.
The latest U.S. military attack on Kharg, and the broader war on Iran, is a reminder of how extractive infrastructures—tied to a fossil-fuel economy accelerating planetary crisis—remain integral to the global economy and geopolitical order, where the United States continues to sustain its position as a hegemonic force. Within a global transport network, Kharg exemplifies how control over energy infrastructure shapes the relentless drive for energy production, as war in turn both finances and secures extraction. Equally important is the normalization of a state of exception that enables two nuclear-armed states to openly wage an illegal war on a non-nuclear state, thereby exposing an ideology in which power legitimates itself through force. In this volatile context, conflicts over energy infrastructure reveal sovereignty as a site of persistent struggle, even as the very infrastructures they target sustain the material conditions of war. Extraction begets war, and war sustains extraction.
If extraction and war are structurally linked, they also produce a regime of perception that renders the histories and lived worlds of places like Kharg invisible. Like many extraction zones around the world, Kharg will likely remain a site of geopolitical fixation long after this latest cycle of confrontation ends, especially as the Trump administration seeks to exert power over resource-rich territories such as Venezuela and Greenland. Yet in my mind, Kharg still holds histories waiting to be uncovered—spectral traces that have shaped the island through mourning and devotion, where land and sea were not merely resources but sites of sacred belonging, and stories that reach far beyond the conflicts of our time and the hubris of war.
