“What will the Iraqi Army do when they leave Iraq?” he said. “That’s what we are afraid of.”

Even at a village elder’s home, where many of the household’s men spent time over recent years in American-run detention facilities here and elsewhere, the imminent end of the American war has brought forth the same ambiguous sentiments.

One of the men, Ahmed Ali Dawood, has welcomed the end of the American military role in Iraq, but worries about the ability of Iraqis to overcome their own anger. His friends and family, as in so many other communities, were divided between those who joined the insurgency and others who welcomed the Americans. “It created hatred among the people,” he said. “You can’t say that people have healed yet. They still don’t trust the government.”

Mr. Dawood spent three months in the Abu Ghraib prison, while the Americans still ran it in 2006, on terrorism charges he said were false. “They were treating me like an animal,” he said. He later spent “three years and one month and 12 days” in Camp Bucca, an American prison in southern Iraq, before being released.

For the United States, the end of its military role is seen as the fulfillment of a promise President Obama made as a candidate and the turning of the page on a painful and costly chapter in recent history — one many Americans have largely moved on from anyway.

Here, it is different. The American invasion and its aftermath are but one layer of a much deeper trauma that started decades ago and was marked by Baath Party terror and the mass graves it generated, the devastating war with Iran and the international sanctions of the 1990s after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. All still resonate. On a wall in the village elder’s home hangs a framed portrait of a relative in a military uniform. He was an officer in Mr. Hussein’s army who disappeared in 1985.

That history makes Iraqis more wary of what could come. Sheik Ali Hamad, another of the men who gathered in the house recently to discuss the exit of American troops, wants the forces to leave, but is angry that the United States will not leave a more stable state in its wake.

“They are leaving the country in the hands of politicians that are like teenagers,” he said. “There may be a sectarian war. This is a bigger scandal than Abu Ghraib, leaving things unfinished and with these politicians.”