U.S. Army admits burning Muslim bodies

The U.S. Army admitted on Saturday it had burned two bodies of dead Muslim Taliban fighters, Reuters news agency reported.

The desecration of the Muslim bodies by the U.S. invading troops in Afghanistan first surfaced on an Australian television last month. The burning of bodies, which violates the tenets of the Islamic religion, harmed the U.S. image, already tarnished with the numerous scandals involving the abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.

The Australian television aired a footage showing U.S. soldiers watching two corpses that were burning at the hills above the village of Gondaz north of Kandahar.

"You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be," read one soldier identified as psyops specialist Sgt. Jim Baker.

However, the U.S. military claimed that a series of investigations found that the soldiers burned the bodies for hygiene purposes and not for desecration.

"Our investigation found there was no intent to desecrate the remains, but only to dispose them for hygienic reasons," Major General Jason Kamiya, U.S. second in command of the U.S.-led occupation forces in Afghanistan, said.

Soldiers implicated in the criminal incident will face disciplinary action and the two junior officers who ordered the burning of the bodies will be reprimanded for "showing a lack of cultural and religious understanding", the U.S. military said.

The incident sparked uproar among Muslims in Afghanistan and the Muslim world, that's already angered by the U.S. policies after numerous scandals uncovered abusive and inhuman tactics used by the American forces against Muslim detainees in several detention centers.

The U.S. currently has 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, claiming they’re on a mission to capture remnants of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters.