Iran building up defenses of Kharg Island to protect against potential US ground attack, sources say

By Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Kylie Atwood, Tal Shalev, CNN

(CNN) — Iran has been laying traps and moving additional military personnel and air defenses to Kharg Island in recent weeks in preparation for a possible US operation to take control of the island, according to multiple people familiar with US intelligence reporting on the issue.

The Trump administration has been weighing using US troops to seize the tiny island in the northeastern Persian Gulf — an economic lifeline for Iran that handles roughly 90% of the country’s crude exports — as leverage over the Iranians to coerce them to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, CNN has reported.

But US officials and military experts say there would be significant risks involved in such a ground operation, including a large number of US casualties. The island has layered defenses, and the Iranians have moved additional shoulder-fired, surface-to-air guided missile systems known as MANPADs there in recent weeks, the sources said.

Iran has also been laying traps including anti-personnel and anti-armor mines around the island, the sources said, including on the shoreline where US troops could possibly stage an amphibious landing if President Donald Trump moved forward with a ground operation.

Some allies of the president are raising serious questions about whether there is a need to attempt such an operation, since successfully taking the island would not, on its own, resolve problems related to the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s stranglehold on the global energy market, the source added.

US Central Command did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Iranian actions on Kharg.

The US military had already targeted Kharg with strikes on March 13, with Central Command saying that 90 targets had been hit, including “naval mine storage facilities, missile storage bunkers, and multiple other military sites.” Trump had announced the attack by saying that US forces had avoided hitting oil infrastructure on the island “for reasons of decency.”

An Israeli source said there is concern that taking control of Kharg would lead to attacks by Iranian drones and shoulder-fired missiles, leading to the deaths of American troops. “The hope is that they won’t take that risk and will instead fire at the oil fields, but there is no way to know,” this source said.

“I would be very worried about this,” said retired Adm. James Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander who now serves as a CNN military analyst. “Iranians are clever and ruthless. They will do everything they can to inflict maximum casualties on US forces both on the ships at sea, and especially once ground troops are anywhere in their sovereign territory.”

The speaker of Iran’s parliament on Wednesday warned the country’s “enemies” against attempting to occupy any Iranian islands.

“Based on some data, Iran’s enemies, with the support of one of the regional countries, are preparing to occupy one of the Iranian islands,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf posted on X. “All enemy movements are under the full surveillance of our armed forces. If they step out of line, all the vital infrastructure of that regional country will, without restriction, become the target of relentless attacks.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Ghalibaf said, “We are closely monitoring all US movements in the region, especially troop deployments.”

Kharg Island is roughly a third of the size of Manhattan, meaning the US would need to deploy a robust landing force to take the island if it moved ahead with such an operation, a person familiar with US military planning told CNN. It’s located at the very northern end of the Persian Gulf, away from the Strait of Hormuz but critically near Iranian oil facilities.

Two Marine Expeditionary Units, which specialize in rapid-response amphibious landings, raids, and assault missions from Navy amphibious ships, have recently deployed to the Middle East. Those units include several thousand Marines along with amphibious warships, aviation assets and landing craft. They are the most likely to be involved in an operation to take Kharg, the sources said. Approximately 1,000 US soldiers with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are also expecting to deploy to the region in the coming days.

Another person familiar with the US military planning said that Central Command has near-constant and persistent overhead surveillance of the island, so the military has been able to see both physical and environmental changes in areas that appear to have been laid with traps.

The US military’s strikes on the island degraded some of its air and sea defenses, which include HAWK surface-to-air missiles and Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, according to Stavridis.

But US forces would still be vulnerable to Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks given the island’s proximity to the Iranian coast, and Trump officials are still grappling with whether a ground mission is worth the risk, according to a source familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations on the issue.

The US retains plans to quickly destroy sensitive information and infrastructure if US installations and military posts abroad are overrun, a source familiar told CNN. It stands to reason, the source said, that Iran could have similar plans.

Gulf allies are also privately urging the Trump administration against prolonging the war by putting boots on the ground to occupy Kharg Island or remove Iran’s highly enriched uranium at a nuclear facility that was previously bombed by US aircraft, a senior Gulf official said. The concern is that occupying Kharg island with US troops would result in high casualties, likely triggering Iranian retaliation against Gulf countries’ infrastructure and prolonging the conflict, the senior Gulf official said.

Instead, Gulf nations are pressing US officials on the need to dismantle Iran’s ballistic missile program before the conflict ends, which US officials agree with. In recent days, the Pentagon briefed Gulf countries that a large portion of Iran’s ballistic and cruise missile capability has been destroyed and that the US is close to completing its target list, without specifying a timeline, the official said.

Stavridis said one possible way to pressure the Iranians is to consider an offshore blockade of Kharg, making it impossible to export the oil. “This could be done without actually putting troops ashore,” he said.

CNN’s Haley Britzky contributed to this report

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