Why is Jark Island a strategic enclave for the Persian country and a target for Trump?

This attack occurs just a couple of days after the speaker of the parliament of iranMohamad Baqer Qalibaf, stated that “the Persian Gulf will be stained with blood of the invaders” if the Iranian islands are invaded after US media pointed to that possibility.

“We will abandon all restraint and make the Persian Gulf stained with the blood of the invaders,” he said in X Qalibaf.

“The jewel in the crown”

But why is there so much interest in this small island? Trump described her as “the crown jewel of Iran” and, really, he was right when he said it.

Below its barely 24 kilometers is the main oil terminal in the country through which he passes 90% of Iranian crude oil —approximately 1.6 million barrels a day—, the vast majority destined for China given that the Persian country is subject to international sanctions that block the sale of its oil.

Connected to the coast with several oil pipelines, the island is located on a oil field four times larger than its own land 25 kilometers from the southern Iranian coast, within the province of Bushehr and about 483 kilometers northwest of the Strait of Hormuz, where some of the largest oil fields in the world are located.

As oil sector expert Gregory Brew recalls in X, the first infrastructure on the island was built by the British company Shell in the 1960s, when Tehran and the West maintained good relations.

During the war between Iran and Iraq Between 1980 and 1988, Iraqi aviation attacked the Jark terminal dozens of times and in February and March 1988 these attacks seriously affected the loading docks.

Then, the Republic moved the export of its crude oil to other oil terminals in the country to keep what is one of its main economic sectors operating.

Currently, in Jark there is an oil terminal with two main docks and ability to load up to seven million barrels per daythe equivalent of ten supertanker ships, although at maximum performance it could reach between 8 and 10 million barrels.

He muelle ‘T’the largest in Iran, consists of six docks, each of which has five measuring machines with a capacity of 13,500 barrels of oil per hour.

The other main dock, called ‘C island’with three docks and up to 30 meters deep, is capable of accommodating vessels of up to 300,000 metric tons (the equivalent of 2 million barrels of crude oil).