Pipe Dreams

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.

“A fascinating and revealing dive into the murky world of oil contracts that shape power and politics in Iraq.” —Loveday Morris, The Washington Post Jerusalem bureau chief“Investigative reporter Erin Banco reveals the complicated conspiracies keeping the richness of Iraqi oil from trickling down to the general populace.... Banco’s reportage vividly shows the human toll that deceit and subterfuge have taken on a land so rich in natural resources.” —Kirkus Reviews“Pipe Dreams is a deeply reported account of an all-too-predictable state of affairs, with corporations and rapacious officials taking advantage of an institutionally weak and unstable country surrounded by war. Many characters in the book emerge with financial credit to their name, but few emerge with any moral credit.” —William Armstrong, Hürriyet Daily News“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