WASHINGTON – A Marine has apologized for writing a song about killing members of an Iraqi family, saying it was written in “good humor.”

The song, widely circulated on the Internet, has provoked outrage from American Muslim groups. It tells the story of a Marine who falls in love with an Iraqi girl. When he goes to meet her family, her brother and father confront him with automatic weapons and shoot her before he uses her younger sister as a human shield and kills his attackers. A four-minute video, called “Hadji Girl,” shows a man singing into a microphone to the cheers of spectators.

At one point he sings: “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.” Corporal Joshua Belile said he wrote the song last year in Iraq and that his fellow Marines taped him as he sang it.

“I apologize for any feelings that may have been hurt,” he said, adding that he would never sing it again. The Marines said the video was “inappropriate.”