FEWER than 50 Muslims have been persuaded to join Britain's armed forces in the past year, despite a high-profile recruitment campaign in areas with high ethnic Asian populations, The Herald can reveal.

FEWER than 50 Muslims have been persuaded to join Britain's armed forces in the past year, despite a high-profile recruitment campaign in areas with high ethnic Asian populations, The Herald can reveal.

Faced with the problem of steadily-declining manpower, the Ministry of Defence had hoped to tap into the pool of 1.6 million British Muslims who traditionally shun military careers.

But the campaign has been a dismal failure and there are now just 330 Muslims across an Army, Royal Navy and RAF, numbering almost 200,000 men and women.

The Muslim contingent is almost outnumbered by the 300 Christian chaplains appointed to take care of the spiritual welfare of the bulk of the UK's fighting services.

They do, however, have their own full-time imam, Asim Hafiz, who is based at Wellington Barracks in London.

According to figures obtained by The Herald, the highest number of Muslim volunteers enlisted last year was 10 in each of two single months. Fewer than five signed up in each of four other months.

Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Crawford, a former tank officer, was funded by the MoD in 1995 to produce a report on the prospects of harnessing the military potential of the UK's ethnic minorities.

He concluded that most Asians of Pakistani origin were "bahia" - merchant - class and would be highly unlikely to join the Army even in their ethnic homeland. Other ethnic minorities such as West Indians faced "significant problems" of institutional racism in the British military.

Colonel Crawford suggested that one way of alleviating minority recruits' fears of isolation and harassment might be to form battalions composed mainly of British Asian or Afro-Caribbean volunteers.

A decade on, the target of achieving a 3% ethnic representation in the forces seems as elusive as ever and his report has been shelved.

Whitehall sources say the perceived backlash against Muslims in the wake of al Qaeda's attacks in 2001 and the unpopularity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are major factors in the lack of Asian volunteers.

The Army alone needs 15,000 new recruits a year simply to replace soldiers who leave at the end of their contracts or for medical or other reasons. In 2006, 12,730 recruits signed up, while 14,460 quit.

At least one Muslim soldier, Pakistani-born Lance-Corporal Jabron Hashmi, was killed in action in Afghanistan in the last year. The 24-year-old Intelligence Corps specialist from Birmingham died along with his friend Corporal Peter Thorpe, also 24, in a Taliban attack on their base in Helmand province in July.

There are currently more than twice as many South Africans and five times as many Fijians in British uniform as UK-born Muslims.