DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The expanding U.S. military campaign against Iran has put three small islands that sit at the confluence of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in the crosshairs once again.
The islands of Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunb — which were seized in 1971 by Iran from what would become the United Arab Emirates — have become a garrison for Iran, helping it exert significant control over the strait, through which a fifth of all oil and natural gas passes in peacetime.
U.S. strikes on two of the islands in recent days have renewed speculation about the fate of these small, rocky isles, whose ownership remains disputed.
The land mass of all three islands totals just about 10 square miles (25 square kilometers). But they carry oversized strategic importance given they sit along the deep-water route taken by ships passing between the strait and the Gulf.
The largest, Abu Musa, has a village on it but primarily serves as a base for Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which has stationed fast boats and missiles — both of which have been used to harass ships in the strait — on the island. It also hosts air defense systems. The same goes for Greater Tunb Island, while the much-smaller Lesser Tunb only has a military presence.
Because of their strategic importance, regional powers have long fought for control of the islands.
Iran, then under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, took the islands by force on Nov. 30, 1971, two days before the formation of the United Arab Emirates. The shah, as America's top security ally in the region, received little pushback at the time.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran used the islands as a base to target shipping during the “Tanker war” of the 1980s, when the U.S. Navy escorted oil tankers through the region under Iranian fire. Iran used the islands to both monitor the strait and launch vessels to lay mines or openly attack vessels in that conflict.
U.S. estimates suggest Iran attacked over 160 ships in that confrontation. So far in the current war, there have been over 50 attacks targeting vessels and oil rigs, according to the Joint Maritime Information Center, a coalition overseen by the U.S. Navy. That includes some incidents of the U.S. firing on ships it accuses of trying to break its blockade on Iran.
In recent days as part of the escalation in fighting, the U.S. military launched strikes on both Abu Musa and Greater Tunb islands. Some analysts have speculated that American forces might invade.
“Together they act as a layered denial system to the most critical energy chokepoint in the world,” Isabel Oakeshott, a columnist for The Telegraph who now lives in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, wrote in the newspaper. She equated Abu Musa to “a fixed aircraft carrier” for Iran.
Taking the islands likely would be possible for the U.S., which has both paratroopers and Marines in the region. However, they likely would be exposed to Iranian attack while there.
“Without prepared, hardened fortifications to provide cover — even with air support from nearby naval assets — force protection would be an enormous challenge,” warned Brandon Carr, an analyst with the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which calls for restraint in American military operations abroad.
“The Marines would come under fire from Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, severely limiting their ability to project power into the strait.”
In recent years, the United Arab Emirates successfully lobbied both China and Russia to include language in joint statements about resolving the ownership of the islands through either negotiations or an international court decision.
That infuriated Tehran — but the world largely ignored the dispute.
“What the world called a bilateral territorial dispute was, from the beginning, a strategic claim on a global chokepoint,” wrote Noora Mohamed Al Murry, an Emirati legal scholar, in April.
“Managed ambiguity, in a waterway this consequential, is not a neutral position. It is a choice with a price, and the world is now holding the invoice.”
Oakeshott, the columnist, predicted that the UAE, which hosts U.S. forces and has repeatedly come under Iranian fire in the war, would likely push to get the islands once the conflict ends.
The U.S. campaign may force the issue to a head, some 55 years after the late shah warned the strait could become a “nuisance” for the world.
“It does not take a big boat to carry a bazooka and a few shells," the shah told The Guardian newspaper in 1971. "But the trouble that it could cause is tremendous.”
Two men wade in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz with vessels anchored in the background, off Bandar Abbas, Iran, Sunday, July 12, 2026. (Razieh Poudat/ISNA via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-born author and agrarian who in poems, stories, novels and essays celebrated the farming communities of his native state and warned of the excesses and misjudgments of an industrial, commercialized society, has died. He was 92.
His daughter, Mary Berry, confirmed on Monday that he died in his home in Port Royal, Kentucky.
“There's not enough I could say about him to do him justice,” she told The Associated Press.
Few authors were more tied to their home than Berry, an intellectual and spiritual heir to Henry David Thoreau and such Southern agrarians as Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom. In prose and poetry that mirrored the uncluttered and deeply felt life he advocated, Berry challenged modern assumptions about prosperity and happiness and renewed the mysteries of birth, love, work and death. He had learned from his own history: Berry was born and raised in a farming town during the Great Depression and watched its seemingly immortal ties unravel by his teens.
“Increasingly over the last maybe forty years, the thought has come to me that the old world in which our people lived by the work of their hands, close to weather and earth, plants and animals, was the true world,” he wrote in “Andy Catlett: Early Travels,” a novel published in 2006, “and that the new world of cheap energy and ever cheaper money, honored greed, and dreams of liberation from every restraint, is mostly theater.”
“The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely, but it was substantial and authentic. The households of my grandparents seemed to breathe forth a sense of the real cost and worth of things. Whatever came, came by somebody’s work.”
Berry was a prolific writer who published more than 40 books, including the novels “Nathan Coulter” and “A Place on Earth,” and the anthology “A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.” His legacy extended well beyond Kentucky. Michael Pollan, author of such bestsellers as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” would say his life was changed by Berry’s declaration that “Eating is an agricultural act.” The chef and food activist Alice Waters cited him as a favorite author and wrote an introduction to Berry’s 1989 essay “The Pleasures of Eating.”
He was among the most prominent authors never to receive a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award, although his honors included a National Humanities Medal and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, he was presented a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle.
The tall, slender Berry imagined, chronicled and lived out his vision of a self-sustaining community in which no one had to ask where their food came from or the names of their neighbors. In the classic farming manifesto “The Unsettling of America,” published in 1977, he attacked the consolidation and mechanization of agriculture as a violation of the natural order, whether of the land or of the spirit.
“The modern urban‐industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth,” he wrote. “At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and experts sets up a profit‐making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation.”
His disdain for modernity touched upon virtually every aspect of life, from dancing to weather forecasts to birth control, opinions he well knew were not universally shared. Reviewing a Library of America anthology of his nonfiction, The New York Times’ Dwight Garner wrote that Berry “bangs the same themes so relentlessly — the perils of industrial agriculture, the decimation of rural life, America’s blind faith in technology — that one’s eyes begin to cross.”
Most of his fiction, closely based on his childhood, was set in rural Port William and populated with such characters as drunken Uncle Peach, the drowned Chicken Little, the wise and patient farm hand Dick Watson and Andy Catlett, Berry’s alter ego, a boy “inclined to be dreamy” and “slide right out of the present world.”
His worldview was shaped by an ancient sense of continuity and connection, like in the story “Watch with Me,” when a troubled man known as “Nightlife” picks up an old shotgun and disappears into the woods. A local posse follows, led by the farmer Tol Proudfoot, who worries Nightlife might kill himself or harm others. The pursuit is long and exhausting. “I reckon it would be better not to have got involved,” Tol admits to himself. But he knows that he will continue “until whatever happened that would allow him (Tol) to cease to go along had happened.”
“I reckon I am involved,” Tol discovers.
Berry yearned for the past but was “painfully divided” by his awareness that “my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors” and that “people were once bought and sold here by my people.” He saw the U.S. as plagued by “disorderly violence,” and inflamed by the rootlessness of the early settlers and the corporations that followed.
“We still have not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America,” he lamented.
History led to some controversial opinions — Berry would regard the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as more “a tragic figure” than an upholder of slavery — and a clash among Berry, the University of Kentucky and some of its students. Berry’s wife Tanya was the niece of artist Ann Rice O’Hanlon, whose Great Depression era fresco about Lexington history has long been controversial for its alleged sanitizing of slavery. Wendell and Tanya Berry filed a lawsuit in 2020 that objected to its removal from the school. Three years earlier, he had defended the fresco as a painful, but realistic portrait.
“Black people did work in tobacco fields,” he wrote. “Black musicians did play for white dancers.”
Berry shunned the unnatural world whenever, and however possible. For decades, he and his wife ran a hillside organic farm in Henry County. They lived without computers, television or phones, but did install solar units in 2005, an act of defiance and of commitment to clean energy in a state powered by coal. Well before his lawsuit against the University of Kentucky, his alma mater, he cut ties after the school accepted $7 million for a new basketball dormitory from a group of donors organized by a coal company president. In 2011, he joined a sit-in at the governor’s office in protest of strip-mining.
Berry was born in Henry County in 1934, and he moved with his family soon after to New Castle, where his father practiced law and all worked on his grandfather’s farm. As a teenager he graduated from the Millersburg Military Institute and entered the University of Kentucky. In college, Berry helped edit the campus magazine “Green Pen,” read the poetry of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and first encountered the agrarian publication “I’ll Take My Stand.” The 1930 release included contributions from Warren and Ransom among others who would later distance themselves from a racist and romanticized view of the rural South held by many agrarians.
By his early 20s, he was publishing poems and stories and even spent time away from Kentucky. He received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University in 1958 and stayed on another year as a visiting lecturer. He also lived in New York, in the early 1960s, but soon purchased Lanes Landing and settled there at the end of the decade.
Berry enjoyed the friendship of such fellow writers as Donald Hall and Bobbie Ann Mason, but was inspired more by Kentucky’s land and resources, by the knowledge that he might stand before the same body of water his grandparents drank from. Berry placed himself and fellow humans in a small and blessed role — “sweetly enabled” — within a grand and ordered universe.
“And so I go into the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place,” he once wrote. “I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces. I feel my life take its place among the lives — the trees, the annual plants, the animals and birds, the living of all these and the dead — that go and have gone to make the life of the earth.”
Associated Press reporter Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.
FILE - Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File)
FILE - President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to poet, novelist, farmer and conservationist, Wendell E. Berry, March 2, 2011, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
FILE - Kentucky author and poet Wendell Berry reads about himself, Feb. 14, 2011, in Frankfort, Ky. (AP Photo/The Independent, John Flavell, File)
FILE - Author Wendell Berry talks with a reporter at his home in Port Royal, Ky., March 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Ed Reinke, File)
