R amesh Khadka began the journey to his slaughter from Lele, Nepal, a valley of rivers where green rice terraces march up the mountains like stairs.

After passing among a series of shadowy, indifferent middlemen, he finished his journey a month later in a dusty ditch in western Iraq. There, bound and helpless, the teenager was shot three times in the back of the head by insurgents, his execution and that of 11 of his countrymen captured on videotape.

The 19-year-old and his colleagues were on their way to jobs at an American military base in Al Anbar province when they were kidnapped. The killings last year remain the worst case of violence against private outside contractors in the Iraq war.

Contractors working for the US, including KBR, a Houston-based subsidiary of Halliburton, have taken tens of thousands of workers into Iraq from impoverished countries, including Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh, to do menial jobs, from cooking and serving food to cleaning toilets.

In relying on a workforce of third- country nationals, however, the US has embraced a system of labor migration rife with abuse, corruption and exploitation, according to dozens of contractors, migrant workers, labor officials and advocates in four countries.

The system revolves around labor brokers, whose numbers have exploded during the last decade in the Middle East and Asia.

Such agencies take advantage of porous borders and rising global demand for cheap labor to move poor workers from one country to low-paying jobs in another.

Although millions of Iraqis are desperate for jobs, the US military requires that contractors such as KBR hire foreigners to work at bases to avoid the possibility of insurgent infiltration.

Willing to work anywhere, the laborers often take out usurious loans to pay the agencies a finder's fee for the overseas jobs. Once abroad, the workers find themselves with few protections and uncertain legal status.

In Iraq, their vulnerability is heightened. Neither the US nor Iraq has an adequate system for protecting their rights, labor advocates say.

Violence is the greatest risk. At least one-third of the 255 contractors reported killed in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003 came from poor countries.

The enforcement of labor rights appears virtually nonexistent. In Khadka's case, it appears the Nepalese were on their way to work for a Jordan- based subcontractor to KBR, family members and manpower agency officials say.

If true, all 12 men should have been covered by generous death benefits required by federal law for anyone working for a US contractor, even indirectly, say insurance and legal experts. But their families have received no such payments.

KBR says it will investigate whether benefits are owed. KBR is the largest employer of third-country nationals, with about 25,000 workers in Iraq, typically through Middle Eastern subcontractors.

Because of the danger of exploitation, some labor-exporting countries, such as the Philippines and Nepal, have forbidden their nationals to work in Iraq. But labor brokers take in such workers using loopholes in a system with almost no regulation. An estimated 5,000 Nepalese work in Iraq.

Labor advocates say the practice amounts to modern-day indentured servitude, funded by US taxpayers.

"This is a sort of slave trade," said Majed Habashneh, undersecretary for Jordan's Labor Ministry, which has struggled to contain a wave of people passing into Iraq. "No one is taking care of the human rights of these people. Who will take responsibility?"

Khadka grew up in a mud and brick home on the outskirts of Lele, one of seven children in a poor farming family.

Lele is a place of astonishing beauty an hour south of Kathmandu, the capital. There is not much work in a village like this in Nepal, one of the world's most impoverished countries. Unemployment is compounded by the Maoist insurgency that has killed more than 12,500 people since 1996.

Rebels frequently kidnap young men as recruits, providing incentive to flee to cities and abroad for work.

Khadka was working at a hotel in Kathmandu for US$38 (HK$296) a month when he learned of job opportunities overseas from Bala Gam Piri, the owner of employment agency Moonlight Manpower. Piri is believed to have fled Nepal after the killings in Iraq, which set off riots in the capital.

Jit Bahadur Khadka, Ramesh's father, explained his son's insistence on leaving Nepal.

For Nepalese, he said, working abroad has become part of the fabric of life. The money they send home accounts for more than one-fifth of the country's tiny economy.

Even folk songs have adopted the language of loss, with one popular tune a lament about a lover who cannot be contacted at his job in faraway Japan.

Khadka joined the diaspora on June 29 last year, boarding a plane for the first time in his life.

"His last words were: `I'm flying now. Don't worry about me. I'll be back in a few years,"' his father said, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief. "I told him, `Wait. I'll send you anywhere.' But he didn't want to wait. He wanted to make something of himself."

As Piri was gathering the workers in Nepal, Hayder Aliam was in Jordan helping arrange their transport to Amman, the capital.

Aliam is the office manager for Morning Star, a Jordanian manpower agency that imports laborers by working with recruiting agencies in poor countries.

Inside Aliam's office in a busy commercial district, women from Indonesia and the Philippines stand in corners while wealthy Jordanians sit in overstuffed leather chairs, sorting stacks of files with job candidate applications.

In class-conscious Amman, the nationality of your domestic help carries a certain status. Filipinos are the most desirable, and thus most expensive, followed by Indonesians and Sri Lankans.

The Nepalese have one advantage, however. Unlike other nationalities, Nepalese do not need a visa before their arrival in Jordan. Thus, when a KBR subcontractor approached Morning Star with an urgent need for workers, the company immediately thought of Nepal, Aliam said.

Morning Star and Moonlight worked together to fill the order. Although Morning Star normally imports domestic servants only for Jordan, the lure of a US$200 fee for each Nepalese for Iraq proved too much to resist. "Iraq was an exception," Aliam said. "It became a matter of money. It was a time to profit."

The identity of the subcontractor remains unclear. Aliam said the men were working for a company called Daoud & Partners, which holds a catering and laundry subcontract with KBR. In early news accounts, however, another Morning Star employee identified the subcontractor as Besharat & Partners, a construction company.

A Daoud official, who did not want to be named, denied any connection to the workers. Besharat & Partners could not be located.

The subcontractor collected the workers at the Amman airport for transport directly into Iraq, Aliam said. From there, the Nepalese were taken to a convoy of vans bound for the long, dangerous road from Jordan into western Iraq. What happened next is unknown. The men simply vanished.

Radhika Khadka was at home on August 20 last year when a neighbor told her about a grainy Internet video being broadcast repeatedly on Nepalese television.

There, Radhika, 55, could see her son crammed into a room with the 11 other men holding their passports in front of them. One of the men, with a US flag draped across his chest, read from a statement in halting English.

He said the group had been kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents who called themselves the Ansar al Sunna Army.

"They said the situation is not dangerous in Iraq, but we saw the opposite when we entered," the man said. "We ask anyone coming to Iraq not to be cheated by the high salary because they are false and America is lying."

When the camera panned over her son, she saw the look on his face and her heart broke. "I felt like I had been hit by a rock," she recalled.

The family contacted Piri, the labor broker, who said he would do everything he could to get their son back. Then he disappeared.

The Nepalese government did little. The country is so poor it has only one embassy in the region, in Qatar, with just four employees.

In desperation, the ambassador turned to Prakash Gurung, a Nepalese businessman who lives in Qatar and runs his own manpower agency there. Gurung heads a committee established by the embassy to troubleshoot international labor issues.

Lacking contacts in Iraq, Gurung sent an e-mail to a Sunni Muslim group whose address he obtained from Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel. The group promised to try to help negotiate, but Gurung is not sure whether they did anything at all.

"Nobody else cared about this," he said. "No other country cared."

Eleven days after the first Internet video, a second surfaced.

This time, none of the Nepalese workers spoke, except to scream.

The first worker was laid on the ground, his throat to the sky. A hand can be seen in the video grasping a knife, slowly sawing through the man's neck as he sputters and chokes, blood gushing from his body.

Over the next few minutes of the video, the Nepalese are brought out in pairs, laid on the ground and shot at close range.

Khadka's family did not watch the execution video. But a childhood friend did. He said he immediately recognized Khadka when he was laid in the ditch alongside a second man. Khadka was shot three times in the back of the head.

He did not appear to suffer, his friend said.

In Kathmandu, the executions touched off a government crisis. Protesters set upon the city's only mosque, burning it and ripping the Koran to pieces. They also attacked hundreds of the widely reviled employment agencies. In two days of rioting, one protester was shot to death and the government clamped down with a 24-hour curfew.

The unrest contributed to the instability King Gyanendra later cited in dissolving the cabinet and declaring a state of emergency that gave him absolute power in February this year.

In the days that followed, the government revoked Moonlight's license. Seeking to quell the outrage, it announced compensation for the survivors. Each family was given nearly US$14,000, a large sum in a country where the annual income is US$279.

The Khadkas have used their money to pay off their son's debt and for Radhika's medical expenses. She had fainting spells after the news of her son's death and refused to leave the family home for seven months.

An earthy, blunt-spoken woman, Radhika has harsh words for the government and for Piri. The government paid the money, she said, to stop the violence. But no one ever apologized. "If we had been big shots, they would have said they were sorry," she said. "But we're poor people. We're nobody."

For Radhika, the violent confluence of world events that led to her son's death remains a mystery.

"He was not a rebel or in the army. He was simply a worker," she said. "He did what they told him to do. He would have swept if they'd told him to sweep, clean if they'd told him to clean a toilet. He would have done anything."

More than a year later, the labor markets operate as usual in Iraq.

US officials said they are about to include new regulations in all Defense Department contracts to prevent labor trafficking. The payment of labor broker fees is not considered trafficking, although exceptionally high fees or interest rates are illegal under US trafficking laws.

Commanders "need to be vigilant to the terms and conditions of employment for individuals employed by DoD contractors," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a memo in September last year. "Trafficking includes involuntary servitude and debt bondage. These trafficking practices will not be tolerated."

In Jordan, the ministries of Labor and of the Interior launched investigations after the killings. Morning Star was shut down for four months but allowed to reopen after promising to stop sending workers to Iraq.

Habashneh, the Jordanian labor official, said his office has struggled to prevent the transit of workers through its borders. Local immigrant workers in Jordan say the business is thriving. "We feel we need to do so much more," Habashneh said.

In Nepal, the government announced recently the closure of 32 additional agencies for sending workers to Iraq. It has proposed a labor law that would set criminal sentences for labor brokers, instead of fines. The measure is facing strong resistance from the brokers.

Even if a new law is passed, skeptics doubt it will have much effect. First, several brokers in Kathmandu say existing laws are bypassed easily, thanks to corruption in the government.

Second, the international nature of the problem makes it difficult to crack down. For instance, although Nepal forbids its workers to go directly to Iraq, a Nepalese can travel to India and then on to Iraq without violating any laws.

Finally, the government is heavily dependent on the money its workers send home and gains little from objecting to abuse of its workers, which is widespread.

If Nepal makes it harder to hire its workers - by demanding higher wages - the hiring countries will turn to another poor country, depriving Nepal of needed cash.

After his death, Khadka's family spent nearly US$1,000 to have a sculpture made of their son, whose body has not been found. The sculpture was dedicated on September 1, a year to the day after he was executed.

It is the only likeness the family has of their son, who never had his picture taken. The only other images of Ramesh Khadka are the blurry videotapes of his kidnapping and execution.

LOS ANGELES TIMES