Kharg Island: Everything You Need to Know About the Island Trump Wants to Invade
Trump first floated seizing Iran’s ‘Forbidden Island’ in 1988 – and now he might actually try it.
As the US-Israeli war with Iran enters its fifth week, Donald Trump is openly talking about seizing a tiny island most Americans had never heard of, and it turns out he first floated the idea 38 years ago.
Kharg Island – a five-mile-long coral outcrop in the Persian Gulf that houses Iran’s vital oil export terminal – could soon become ground zero for what would be the most reckless escalation of the conflict yet.
As Zeteo has reported, senior Trump administration officials have been briefed on casualty estimates for a Kharg ground invasion, and in multiple scenarios, American losses would be “considerable.”
So, here are 7 things you should know about Kharg Island…
1. Welcome to the ‘Forbidden Island’
Kharg Island sits about 20 miles off Iran’s northern coast in the Persian Gulf. It’s only about five miles long and three miles wide, barely a speck on a map compared to Iran’s over 630,000 square miles of land.
Kharg is officially restricted; there are no tourists, no journalists, and no visits to the island without government clearance. It’s earned the nickname “Forbidden Island” because the only people allowed on it are oil workers, military personnel, and around 8,000 residents.
Satellite images of Kharg show rows of massive storage tanks, flames shooting from flare stacks, and a web of pipelines running to vast piers where supertankers dock. Beneath all that infrastructure? 2,400-year-old rock carvings, ruins of one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the Persian Gulf, and an 18th-century Dutch East India Company fort. Iranian writer Jalal Al-e-Ahmad once called it “the orphan pearl of the Persian Gulf.”