German Lawmakers in a Row Over Allowing Army to Fight Terror Inside Country

German lawmakers are disputing whether the army should be allowed to support police in countering terrorism on the German soil amid the threat of possible terrorist attacks in the country.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Sunday, the head of the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution said that the Islamic State jihadist group, banned in many countries including Russia, was planning to carry out terrorist attacks against Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) conservatives have repeatedly called for changes to the Constitution to allow soldiers to be deployed internally. However, a number of other political forces have opposed the proposed move.

"The Bundeswehr [German army] troops should not be used as a cheap reserve of personnel for the police, who may have been too sharply reduced in numbers," Hans-Peter Bartel, a lawmaker from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), told the Nordwest-Zeitung.

Under current laws, the army personnel can only be deployed inside Germany temporarily to help handle disasters such as floods.

German land forces are currently deployed in a number of regions across Europe, the Middle East and Africa as part of UN, NATO and EU operations. Changes to the constitution to allow internal deployment of army personnel to fight terror threat would require two-thirds of the lawmakers to back the move.