Could U.S. Forces Capture Kharg Island? (opens in new tab)

Kharg Island sits in the northern Persian Gulf like a heavily industrialized oil outpost rather than a traditional island town. Storage tanks stretch across the landscape in tight clusters, pipelines snake toward massive loading jetties, and tanker berths extend into the Gulf where supertankers normally load millions of barrels per day. Roughly ninety percent of Iran’s crude exports pass through this single facility, which is why the island occupies such an outsized role in energy geopolitics...