In 2006 she deployed to Iraq. July of that year was the war’s deadliest month that far. The Baghdad Morgue alone received 1,855 corpses. Ashli’s commanding officers, reported The New York Times, still believed that Iraqis could be “tamed.” That year, five U.S. soldiers raped an Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Then they killed her and set fire to her body, and killed her mother, her father, and her little sister. At the end of the year, Saddam Hussein was hanged.
