By Michael Fischer and Susann Prautsch, dpa
Berlin (dpa) - Sascha B was a calm, competent and sociable young man, moving steadily through the ranks of the German military over the course of three years as he trained Bundeswehr recruits in the use of infantry weapons.

The fact that Sascha B - whose full name was withheld due to privacy considerations - had converted to Islambefore joining the military was considered irrelevant by his employers.

The changes were creeping. At the age of 26, he started growing his beard, wearing Middle Eastern garments in his free time and going AWOL on occasion.

Suspicions only arose when he refused to train reservists shortly after members of his unit were sent to Afghanistan, justifying his stance by saying the weapons could be used against his fellow Muslims.

Called in by his company commander, Sascha B refused to trim his beard according to army regulations, citing the German constitutional commitment to freedom of worship and threatening to organize a demonstration in front of his barracks.

When officials from the military counterintelligence service (MAD) interrogated him, Sascha B made plain that he saw sharia law as superior to the German constitution and that for him every conversation was Dawa - a missionary call to Islam.

It also became apparent that Sascha B was frequenting mosques run by the ultra-conservative Salafist school of Islam.

"If I am able to choose between two evils - the Bundeswehr and having no income - I will decide for the lesser evil and stay in the military," he told the MAD officials.

His dismissal from the Bundeswehr followed shortly thereafter. Sascha B still does not see himself as an extremist and regards the action taken against him as unjustified.

The case - dating back to 2010 - was the first of its kind to draw wider public attention. At the time hardly anyone had heard of the Islamic State extremist group, and few were worried by the idea that young Muslims in Europe could be recruited for jihad.

According MAD, 29 former Bundeswehr soldiers have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join extremist groups, and 65 active soldiers are under investigation on suspicion of Islamist tendencies. Since 2007, 22 soldiers have been classified as Islamists, all of whom have either been dismissed or have left the military.

"We perceive a risk that the Bundeswehr may be used as a training ground for potentially violent Islamists," says MAD chief Christof Gramm.

The Paris attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine came days after Gramm was appointed in January 2015. The fact that the attackers appeared to have undergone military training came as a wake-up call, he says.

"It would be negligent of a MAD president not to ask what would happen if a Bundeswehr-trained Islamist did something like this, and we had failed to notice anything," he says.

German intelligence believes that Islamic State is actively recruiting fighters with military training.

Since the end of conscription in 2011, the Bundeswehr has been short of recruits. Basic training in the first three months includes the use of weapons and tactical skills.

Critics say the status quo lends itself to abuse. But the Defence Ministry is taking steps to counter the Bundeswehr's infiltration by Islamists.

The ministry is preparing a draft law that foresees background checks on all potential army recruits. There are currently no prior checks for soldiers, except those seeking to work with classified documents or in sensitive areas.

There are at leat 1,200 Muslims in the Bundeswehr. One of them is Nariman Reinke, a senior 36-year-old non-commissioned officer of Moroccan origin working in electronic intelligence.

Reinke works in a sensitive area and was subjected to intense security checks of a nature that she found unsettling. The checks usually go on for about 15 months, but in her case the process lasted three years.

Reinke recalls that by the second of three interviews, MAD officers were asking probing questions about her religious practices.

"They were looking for radical Muslims. They could have saved themselves the trouble if they had done their research a little better. It was certainly unpleasant," she says.

Now that the process is complete, Reinke backs background checks on all soldiers before they are recruited. "A situation in which there are terrorists trained by the Bundeswehr has to be avoided at all costs," she says.

Sumber