Iran's 8 Mile

This week, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and landed on an island that suddenly everyone has been talking about since the U.S.-Israel war on Iran started: Kharg Island. It's potentially the kind of place that could tip the balance, and yet, barely anyone talks about it beyond oil and military headlines. Which is a shame, because the island is... strange in the best way. It has its own language. It was once used to exile leftists and Marxists during the Shah era. Gazelles walk around freely near the oil pipelines. And somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000 civilians live there right now, in the middle of all of this, and almost no one is writing about them. I spent an unreasonable amount of time digging through corners of the internet to find everything about Kharg that isn't just tanks and pipelines. I hope it shows.

Also this week: I made a conscious decision this week to look for some good news because, honestly, we need it. Mountain bongos in Kenya are back. In Malawi, contraceptive use has more than doubled to 45%, and Sierra Leone now requires women to represent 30 percent of parliamentary candidates. Plus, a Japanese experimental album from the 70s, China's modern Nostradamus, heartbreak songs from Mexico, and one scientific fail that made me question everything.

This issue has been edited by Jonathan Ramsay.

There are civilians on Kharg Island, too. Not just oil facilities

Refresher: The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, which means nearly one-fifth of the world's oil and natural gas supply is still stuck. In the meantime, the Iranian government said last week, 'we've exported even more oil since the war started.' How? Through one tiny island: Kharg Island. The tiny island off Iran's western coast measures only roughly 8 square miles (yes, I'm thinking of 8 Mile, too; that's about one-third the size of Manhattan) and is considered Iran's "economic lifeline". Some 90% of Iran's crude oil is handled here, and most of it destined for Asia, specifically China. U.S. President Trump, it's been reported, is looking to the island as a potential gotcha in this war (he's threatened to destroy it if there's no deal soon and Hormuz remains closed). That scenario is looking more and more possible, with Trump losing his temper on Truth Social over the weekend, posting "Open the F***in' Strait". It's not really clear how much of an option the Kharg Island option really is for the U.S. (or if it's simply war-time chest-bumping 'I'm strong, look at me' talk). The U.S. already struck it on March 13, "totally obliterating" every military target, in Trump's words, though the oil infrastructure was left standing. Residents also say, 'there's no military base here, I don't know what they hit'. Iran has since upped its defenses. Any further escalation would be a major turning point in the war, with consequences nobody can fully predict. And yet: the conversation about Kharg Island almost never includes the people who live on it.

What happened:
Not much has happened yet. Yesterday's address by Trump didn't mention the island specifically either (he threatened the entire country instead). If the U.S., however, does decide to struck the island, this would impact the war in a major way, the world, and Kharg Island's civilian population. Most news articles that discuss Kharg Island focus on military and oil angles, not on the island's civilian population nor its history. At least 8,000 civilians live on Kharg Island, other sources say 20,000, but there's very little attention paid to this fact.

Why this matters: The civilians of Kharg Island exist in a kind of double invisibility: first made inaccessible by the Iranian state's restrictions on the island, then again by Western media's dominant framing of the island as purely an oil asset. Who these people are, how long their families have been there, what they think about what's happening right now: almost none of that has made it into the record.

Tell me more:
So in true What Happened Last Week fashion, let's talk less about military angles and more about the island and its people themselves. Kharg Island is, by its geography, more than "just an oil terminal". Here's a quick history lesson:

• It's quite unique nature-wise. Most islands in the Persian Gulf are dry, salty and barely habitable. Kharg has natural freshwater springs, groves of palm trees, and fertile ground. Gazelles walk around freely.

• People have lived there since roughly 1000 BC, across the Elamite, Achaemenid and Sassanid eras. The island is layered with evidence of this: mass graves from the ancient city of Palmyra (today part of Syria, then the westernmost city of Iran during the Parthian era), a shrine locals say belongs to a descendant of the biblical prophet Noah, and a 2,400-year-old wall carving in Cuneiform. There are also ruins of one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the Persian Gulf, Zoroastrian burial sites, and a Dutch fort from 1747.

• For most of its history, Kharg was a maritime community. Arab and Persian fishing families were part of trading networks that stretched from the West Asia to the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese came and occupied it. Then the Dutch. In 1766, someone named Mir Muhanna, the governor of a nearby port, expelled the Dutch for good.

• In the 1950s, the Shah used it as a remote exile for around 120 political prisoners, mostly leftists and members of the Tudeh Party, an Iranian Marxist-Leninist communist party. Some of Iran's most prominent leftist intellectuals were banished there. One of them, Karim Keshavarz, wrote "Fourteen Months on Kharg", a documentary memoir of life in exile that became part of the Iranian political literary tradition.

• The oil era arrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The island became Iran's main oil export hub for two very practical reasons. First, oil from the big fields in the southwest could be easily pumped there through pipelines, so everything was centralized in one place. Second, and more importantly, the island sits in deep water, which meant huge oil tankers could dock right next to it. Most of Iran's coastline is too shallow for these ships, but Kharg could handle them, which made transporting oil much cheaper and faster.

• And the oil era didn't arrive gently. When the Iranian writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad visited the island in 1960, he watched homes and palm groves being demolished to make way for airfields, loading docks, dormitories and oil infrastructure. He wrote that Kharg was "being swept away by large bulldozers." In true writer-fashion, he called the derricks and smokestacks rising in their place "the coarse, unadorned minarets of the massive temple of the age of machines and oil." Al-e Ahmad named the island "the orphan pearl of the Persian Gulf", a place that is very important to Iran's economy...