Qahtan Kareem is a businessman whose main business — the United States — is leaving town. He made his fortune buying and reselling scrap and surplus from military bases. Now, as the American Army withdraws from Iraq, he is grim about the future of his company and its 430 employees.

“It’s going to be a disaster,” he said, sitting in an office lined with framed photographs of him with American officers. “There are no jobs outside American camps.”

While the political and security consequences of the American withdrawal have yet to be fully resolved, The New York Times reports its economic effects have already taken a sharp toll on the tens of thousands of Iraqis who earned their livelihoods, sometimes at great risk, working for the military and the legions of American civilian and defense contractors.

They are now stranded between worlds, struggling to find new jobs in a country where about one in four people is unemployed, and scorned by those who view working for Westerners as treachery. Dozens have been killed, and few have been able to take advantage of American programs to relocate endangered Iraqi allies, discouraged by long waiting lists and tangled rules for applying.

Read the entire story at nytimes.com