Sunni tribes sought as key for IS fight
HABANIYAH, Iraq – Parading across a desert base, hundreds of Sunni tribesmen who graduated a crash training course stood ready to take on the Islamic State group on behalf of a government that many believed left them to die at the hands of the extremists.
Among them were tribesmen who watched as Iraqi forces abandoned Ramadi a month ago to the Islamic State group. Their suspicions toward the Shiite-led government in Baghdad could be seen as they pushed forward to receive their first government salary in 18 months, with one brandishing a Kalashnikov assault rifle as he neared the front.
“For a year and a half, we told them we need weapons, we need salaries, we need food, we need protection, but our requests were ignored until the disaster of Ramadi happened,” said Sheikh Rafa al-Fahdawi, one of the leaders of the Al Bu Fahad tribe of Anbar province.
But money and weapons alone won’t be enough to repair the mistrust between Baghdad and the Sunni tribes it now needs to battle the Islamic State group, which holds about a third of the country and neighboring Syria in its self-declared “caliphate.” After Iraqi forces abandoned Ramadi and then turned to Shiite militias for help, both sides remain suspicious of each other, threatening any effort to work together.
Iraq’s Sunnis long have complained of discrimination and abuse since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led dictatorship and replaced it with a government dominated by the country’s Shiite majority. But the collapse of Iraqi forces in Ramadi on May 17 crystalized the fears many Sunni tribesmen had when their pleas for help went unanswered.
Germanwings victim buried in Barcelona
MONTCADA, Spain – Three months after the Germanwings jet crashed in the French Alps, about 500 tearful mourners packed a funeral home Saturday to say goodbye to Robert Oliver Calvo, who was on his last regular business trip abroad before a work change that would have kept him home more.
The father of two small children and the only child of his parents was remembered in an auditorium by the standing crowd as a deeply religious and dedicated family man, who had been on a business trip abroad for the Barcelona-based clothing store chain Desigual.
The only mention of the crash itself during the service in the hilly Barcelona suburb of Montcada was in the funeral program, which said he died at age 36 “in the airplane tragedy in the Alps on the Germanwings Airbus A320 owned by Lufthansa.”
“This is the worst thing that can happen to a father and a mother: lose a loved one,” Oliver Calvo’s father, Robert Tansill Oliver, said in an interview after the memorial service – the only one so far for a victim of the plane crash that the media have been allowed to attend.
Oliver Calvo had worked for years as a real estate manager for a successful company that bucked Spain and Europe’s financial crisis with store openings galore, and his job was to travel to countries such as Austria, Germany, Poland and Switzerland for mid-week trips lasting three to four days to make sure the openings went off without a hitch.
Associated Press
