Ahvaz

Ahvaz is the capital of Khuzestan Province in south-western Iran, home to around 1.3 million people on the Karun River near the Iraqi border. Khuzestan holds roughly 80 per cent of Iran's proven oil reserves, making Ahvaz the effective centre of the country's oil industry and, by extension, one of the likeliest grounds for any campaign targeting Iran's export capacity, given its proximity to Kharg Island, Iran's primary oil export terminal.

The province was a major theatre of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), when Ahvaz itself came under sustained bombardment, a history that shapes how the city reads its renewed exposure in the 2026 war. Its majority ethnic Arab population has long faced discrimination, a persistent fault line in Iranian domestic politics that regional Arab states have watched without publicly backing separatist claims.

That history was reactivated in the opening weeks of the war: Ahvaz was one of four cities Israel struck simultaneously in the 22 March wave that Al Jazeera called unprecedented in scale, alongside Isfahan, Karaj and Bandar Abbas, with a hospital hit directly amid over 81,000 damaged civilian structures recorded nationwide.