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    Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth
    Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth
    Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth
    Ebook133 pages2 hours

    Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth

    By Erin Banco

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    What happened to Iraq’s oil wealth?

    Iraq sits on top of more than 140 billion barrels of oil, making it the owner of the world’s fifth largest reserves. When the United States invaded in 2003, the Bush Administration promised that oil revenue—according to one report, totaling some $700 billion since the invasion, accounting for at least 80 percent of the Iraqi government budget—would be used to win the war and to rebuild and democratize the country. But fifteen years later, those dreams have been shattered. The economy has flat-lined, millions of people are internally displaced, and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have had to provide billions of dollars to the country every year. Where did all the oil revenue go?

    Based on court documents and on exclusive interviews with sources who have investigated energy companies, American, British and Iraqi government officials, and the middlemen between them, reporter Erin Banco traveled to oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan—an autonomous region that holds, according to the regional government, some 45 billion barrels of crude—to uncover how widespread corruption, tribal cronyism, kickbacks to political parties, and the war with ISIS have contributed to the plundering of Iraq’s oil wealth. The region’s economy and political stability have been on the brink of collapse, and local people are suffering. Pipe Dreams is a cautionary tale that reveals how the dream of an oil-financed, American-style democracy in Iraqi Kurdistan now looks like a completely unrealistic fantasy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherColumbia Global Reports
    Release dateJan 29, 2018
    ISBN9780997722956
    Pipe Dreams: The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth
    Author

    Erin Banco

    Erin Banco is a Middle East reporter, and has been covering armed conflict and human rights violations in the Middle East for six years. She began her career as a freelance reporter in Cairo during the Arab spring. She covered the revolts in the region and the war in Syria. After graduating from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, she worked as the Middle East correspondent for International Business Times, breaking stories on the rise of the Islamic State group and on the Free Syrian Army arms program. Banco also traveled to Gaza to cover the war with Israel in the summer of 2014. More recently, Banco began covering the Islamic State group's economy by tracking illicit oil sales in Turkey and Iraq. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and lives in New York City.

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      Book preview

      Pipe Dreams - Erin Banco

      Praise for Pipe Dreams

      With her trademark meticulous reporting, Erin Banco brings us the woefully untold story of theft in Iraq: the robbing of the Iraqi people’s natural resource rights. She takes us behind the scenes of broken promises and charts an ongoing network of corruption and deceit that has continued to plunder not only Iraq’s oil wealth, but the lives of its would-be beneficiaries. The result is a journalistic tour de force that can’t be ignored.

      —Lauren Bohn,

      Co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted and Middle East correspondent for The GroundTruth Project

      Erin Banco expertly tells the complicated story of corruption that lies at the heart of the endless problems gripping Kurdistan and greater Iraq. Her investigative work on the country’s troubled oil industry is deeply researched and engagingly told—and it shows how mismanagement and greed have turned a resource that should be a blessing into a curse. The book offers a unique and timely window onto the country’s tumultuous past, as well as a lens for understanding the instability and violence that continue to plague it today.

      —Mike Giglio,

      Buzzfeed

      Pipe Dreams

      The Plundering of Iraq’s Oil Wealth

      Copyright © 2018 by Erin Banco

      All rights reserved

      Published by Columbia Global Reports

      91 Claremont Avenue, Suite 515

      New York, NY 10027

      globalreports.columbia.edu

      facebook.com/columbiaglobalreports

      @columbiaGR

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962880

      ISBN: 978-0997722956

      Book design by Strick&Williams

      Map design by Jeffrey L. Ward

      Author photograph by Miranda Sita

      For Mom and Dad

      With love and gratitude

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Return of the Resource Curse

      Chapter One

      Capital of the Oil Mirage

      Chapter Two

      The Wizard of Oil

      Chapter Three

      All in the Family

      Chapter Four

      Here Comes the West

      Chapter Five

      Game Changer

      Chapter Six

      Revolving Door

      Chapter Seven

      Strange Cargo

      Chapter Eight

      The Sufferings of Corruption

      Chapter Nine

      The ISIS Oil Grab

      Chapter Ten

      The Guardians of the Treasure

      Conclusion

      No Place Like Home

      Acknowledgments

      Further Reading

      Notes

      Return of the Resource Curse

      Fouad Hussein’s Lexus SUV roared down the dusty highway on the outskirts of Kirkuk. Hussein, so optimistic just a few years back, was taking me on a dispiriting tour as he unwound a dispiriting story. It was the winter of 2016, and Iraq was in its third year of war against ISIS. Just over fifty miles south, in the town of Tuz Khurmatu, Kurdish militias were facing off against Shiite fighters backed by the Iraqi central government, both vying for greater control over Kirkuk. The war, Hussein said, was not just about defeating a terrorist organization, but about political factions and armies fighting for control and influence.

      As Hussein and I drove, we passed by refugee camps. The battle with ISIS had sucked the region dry of cash and contributed to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history. As bad, some international oil companies had begun to wonder whether Iraqi Kurdistan was the investment opportunity it was advertised to be following the U.S. invasion. Fed up with disappointing exploration results coupled with years of instability and a frustrating oil ministry, some oil companies had pulled out of the region. Several oil companies were in debt and had not received payouts from the cash-strapped Kurdistan Regional Government as promised in their contracts. Civil servants, despite raucous demands, had not been paid by the government in months.

      Hussein, a member of the province’s oil and gas committee, was elected to the council in 2005. Hussein has lived in Kirkuk most of his life, decades in which the city has been fought over constantly. He saw it subjected to the Anfal campaign of genocide under former President Saddam Hussein, who sought to contain Kurdish aspirations for self-determination. He saw his friends die fighting for Kurdish rights and freedom and witnessed Kurdish homes completely leveled by Saddam’s military. And then, upon the ousting of Saddam, he saw hundreds of thousands of people begin to hope.

      Foreign energy companies slowly arrived in the late 1990s, and then en masse following the American invasion in 2003, with plans to develop Iraqi Kurdistan into one of the most productive oil and natural gas regions in the Middle East. Despite the Kurds’ lingering tensions with the Baghdad government, a new, wildly prosperous era seemed just over the horizon. More than ten years later, Hussein said, those dreams were in tatters. Initial hopes that things would turn out for the better have mostly resulted in disappointment.

      The fight between Kurdish and Iraqi militias dramatically escalated in late 2017, following a Kurdish referendum for independence. After the vote, Iraqi forces moved into Kirkuk, taking over key positions the Kurds had guarded since 2014, and control of the oilfields changed hands. The intense stand-off not only escalated tensions between Baghdad and Erbil, but also caused internal rifts between the Kurdish main political parties and their soldiers. The skirmishes seemed to wipe away any hope by the Kurds that they would soon solidify their control in Kirkuk and gain full autonomy from the central government.

      The extreme swings of war and terrorism, going back to the early days of Saddam and even before, have left their mark on the Iraqi people. Millions of ordinary Iraqis have been displaced from their homes. Thousands of people, both Iraqi and American, have died. That story, chronically recycled by news outlets, certainly deserves to be told. But a more complicated story—and yet no less important one—is the promise made to the Iraqis that after the bombs and bullets stopped flying, after Saddam had been vanquished, their lives would be made immeasurably better. One of the reasons? Because Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan sit on some of the world’s largest oil reserves. And in times of peace, billions of dollars could flow from those oil riches into the public coffers, replacing chaos and poverty with prosperity and plenty.

      It hasn’t worked out that way for Iraqi Kurdistan.

      This book tells the story of the government’s actions in Iraqi Kurdistan, how squabbling, coupled with the introduction of Western oil companies in the region, robbed the Iraqi people of their natural resource rights. The story is complex: Pipe Dreams is not all-encompassing. It tells just a sliver of the larger narrative of oil corruption in Iraqi Kurdistan. This book is not about the technicalities of Iraqi Kurdistan’s oil industry, or the nuances of production and sales, though it does touch on some of these subjects. It instead focuses on what happened behind the scenes between the Kurdish government and international oil companies—negotiations, payouts, and kickbacks that exacerbated the plundering of the region’s oil. It explores the effort by corporations to take advantage of a crumbling country engulfed in war, and a regional government’s vision of gaining greater autonomy from Baghdad through oil sales. All of this unfolds in the context of a political climate rife with financial rivalries, constant war, and an economic crisis triggered in part by teetering oil prices and an influx of refugees.

      It should be noted that this story—the resource curse in Iraqi Kurdistan—is one shared with the people who live elsewhere in Iraq, under the leadership of the central government in Baghdad. Oil corruption exists there, too, but the story in Baghdad looks different, because the Iraqi government uses a completely different model to govern its oil sector. As you read this book, know that much of what unfolded in Iraqi Kurdistan is a product, at least in part, of the political and military position in Baghdad and its relationship to the West, most notably the U.S.

      In more than a hundred interviews conducted for this book, the people in Iraqi Kurdistan told me they thought their lives would improve once oil giants set up shop. They said they expected more job opportunities. Some thought the mere presence of wealthy companies would bring prosperity. Although many of them worry about their safety and the war against ISIS, they also worry about how they are going to put food on the table at night. It is a worry propelled and exacerbated in part by the government’s corruption and by the failed promises that first came from politicians and oil companies during the U.S. invasion to overthrow Saddam.

      The money from oil did flow, but little of it has reached ordinary Kurdish people, either directly or in the form of regional projects. While oil revenues have funded the Kurdish military in its fight against ISIS, big sums have been siphoned off in a web of corruption, whereby some in the Kurdish political elite created a system of pay-to-play contracts and kickbacks that enriched themselves while the people of Iraqi Kurdistan lived through a financial crisis. By some accounts, billions of dollars have disappeared to fraud.

      Indeed, Iraqi Kurdistan seems a classic example of the resource curse. Oil is found, pumped, shipped, and sold (and sometimes stolen). Regimes, politicians, ministers, and companies come and go. And yet the average person benefits marginally or not all. If the generic chaos of war, terrorism, and political infighting explains some of this, it doesn’t explain it all. For the Kurds, greed and fraud, tolerated if not abetted by U.S. and

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