The Iranian Kharg island is a coral outcrop in the Persian Gulf, 25 kilometers off mainland Iran. It is now the cynosure and flashpoint of the ensuing battle of wits between the seemingly irrepressible Iranians, and the increasingly frustrated US-Israeli forces. Like most things in civilisational Iran, the Kharg island has a recorded antiquity and plurality that dates back to the Achaemenid-era (550–330 BCE) with a Christian monastery (7th Century), Zoroastrian burial site, a Mir Mohammed Shrine, and a tumultuously wounded history of having passed hands ~ from the empires of Persia to Arab lands, from the Portuguese to the Dutch and British, and finally back to the Iranians. Legendary Iranian writer Jalal Al-e-Ahmad had once called this relatively isolated and forgotten 22-square kilometer island the “Orphan pearl of the Persian Gulf”.

It later acquired more sinister perceptions after becoming a penal exile for political opponents, and later still, as the “Forbidden Island” owing to carefully restricted entry only for those with official security clearances by the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). But today the strategic geography (linking the global energy system with the passageway of the Strait of Hormuz) and proximity to major offshore facilities has made it the undisputed backbone of the Iranian economy and survival. Kharg island now processes 90 per cent of Iran’s total oil exports, handling approximately 950 million barrels every year. At one point, it had become the world’s largest oil shipment terminal. As the backbone of Iran’s national revenue source through the oil export system, Kharg Island is critical to the functioning of the Iranian sovereign state.

Geographical isolation and disproportionate economic dependence on Kharg island for the Iranians makes it a highly exposed node for the Ayatollah regime in Tehran. Kharg island also has a proven wartime vulnerability, as it was repeatedly attacked by the Iraqi forces in the decade long Iran-Iraq war. This........

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