Awad renewed calls for congressional hearings on the behavior of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

CAIRO — The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest US Muslim advocacy group, has welcomed an apology by US Marine Corporal Joshua Belile for a song glorifying the killing of Iraqi civilians.

"We welcome Corporal Belile's apology and will leave it to military authorities to determine whether any disciplinary action is warranted," CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement emailed to IslamOnline.net.

Belile told the Jacksonville Daily News on Wednesday, June 14, his four-minute video posted on the Internet, "Hadji Girl," was only intended as a joke.

"This song was written in good humor and not aimed at any party, foreign or domestic," he said.

"I apologize for any feelings that may have been hurt in the Muslim community," he told the local newspaper.

Singing of an Iraqi girl he met during an attack, the lyrics go: "I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me. As the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally.

"I blew those little f--kers to eternity. ... They should have known they were f--king with the marines."

Belile, who lives in North Carolina after serving in Iraq, said the expletive-laced song had no connection with the killing of dozens of Iraqi civilians by US soldiers in Haditha.

"It's a song that I made up and it was nothing more than something supposed to be funny."

Last November, US soldiers killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children, near Haditha as they had gone on rampage after their patrol was attacked.

Insensitivity

Belile said the song was a mere joke.

The US Marine Corps has described the song as "inappropriate" and has opened a preliminary investigation into the incident.

The US Muslim advocacy group said its criticism was never to target an individual Marine "but instead to address the larger issue of insensitivity to the suffering of Iraqi civilians."

Awad renewed calls for congressional hearings on the behavior of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon decided on Thursday, April 1, to give ethic training to all its troops in Iraq following the Haditha massacre.

Accusations that trigger-happy US soldiers often kill civilians and that little disciplinary action has resulted in the few cases investigated continues to infuriate Iraqis.

A British soldier has quit the army in disgust of the "illegal and immoral" practices of the US-led forces in Iraq.

"As far as the Americans were concerned, the Iraqi people were sub-human, untermenschen," Ben Griffin, a trooper in the Special Air Service's counter-terrorist team, told the Telegraph on Sunday, March 12, using the term used by the Nazis to describe Jews and Russians.