Ahvaz

Ahvaz sits atop Iran's largest oil reserves and ranks among the world's most polluted cities—a combination that distills the resource curse into a single metropolitan area. The capital of Khuzestan Province, Ahvaz straddles the Karun River in southwestern Iran, where the Zagros Mountains meet the Mesopotamian lowlands. This flat, oil-rich terrain made Khuzestan the prize that Iraq invaded to seize in 1980, launching an eight-year war that devastated the city and killed hundreds of thousands.

Oil was discovered in Khuzestan in 1908 at Masjed Soleyman, making Iran one of the world's first petroleum exporters. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP) built its extraction infrastructure here, and Ahvaz became the administrative center for an industry that generates the majority of Iran's export revenue. The National Iranian Oil Company's Khuzestan operations still produce roughly 80% of the country's crude output.

The environmental cost is visible from space. Dust storms—intensified by the drying of the Hoor al-Azim marshlands along the Iraqi border—blanket Ahvaz with particulate matter that regularly exceeds WHO safety limits by 10 to 20 times. Industrial pollution from steel plants, sugar refineries, and petrochemical facilities compounds the natural dust. In 2011, the WHO identified Ahvaz as the world's most polluted city, a ranking it has contested but not convincingly refuted.

Ahvaz's population of roughly 841,000 includes a significant Arab minority whose grievances over economic marginalization, despite living atop the nation's primary revenue source, fuel periodic unrest. Water scarcity adds another pressure: the Karun, once Iran's only navigable river, suffers from upstream dam diversions that reduce flow to the city. Ahvaz demonstrates the paradox of extraction economies: the communities closest to the resource bear the environmental and security costs while the revenues flow to a distant capital.