World Digest

Syrians, Iraqis describe fear inside

IS group’s realm

ESKI MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — Inside the Islamic State’s realm, the paper testifying that you have “repented” from your heretical past must be carried at all times. Many people laminate it just to be safe. It can mean the difference between life and death.

Bilal Abdullah learned that not long after the extremists took over his Iraqi village, Eski Mosul, a year ago. As he walked down the street, an Islamic State fighter in a pickup truck asked directions to a local mosque. When Abdullah didn’t recognize the mosque’s name, the fighter became suspicious.

“He told me my faith is weak and asked, ‘Do you pray?’” Abdullah recalled. Then the fighter asked to see his “repentance card.” Abdullah had been a policeman until the IS takeover, and policemen and soldiers are required to have one. So are many other former government loyalists or employees — even former English teachers, since they once taught a “forbidden” language and tailors of women’s clothes because they once designed styles deemed un-Islamic.

Abdullah had left his card at home. Terrified, he sent his son running to get it.

“They are brutal people,” he told The Associated Press. “They can consider you an infidel for the simplest thing.”

Tears shed for Germanwings victim

MONTCADA, Spain (AP) — 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 Barcelonabased 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 like Austria, Germany, Poland and Switzerland for midweek trips lasting three to four days to make sure the openings went off without a hitch.