By Samia Nakhoul

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Ridiculed at first, the new power which has seized a third of Iraq and triggered the first American air strikes since the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011 – has carved itself a powerful and possibly lasting presence in the Middle East.

The bombing of fighters of the Sunni Islamic State is unlikely to turn around Iraq and its fragmented condition has given the self-proclaimed caliphate the opportunity to establish a hub of jihadism in the heart of the Arab world.

To confront the Islamic State storming through the villages of eastern Syria and western Iraq, an international coalition sanctioned by the United Nations would need to be set up, analysts in and outside the Gulf region said.

The jihadist army, whose ambition for a cross-border caliphate between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers was not initially taken seriously by their opponents, is now brimming with confidence, emboldened by blood and treasure.

The warriors of the new caliphate are exploiting sectarian and tribal faultlines in Arab society, petrifying communities into submission and exploiting the reluctance of Washington and the West to intervene more robustly in the civil war in Syria.

Unlike Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, which set its sights on destroying the West, the Islamic State has territorial goals, aims to set up social structures and rages against the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 between Britain and France that split the Ottoman empire and carved borders across the Arab lands.

President Barack Obama's decision to step back into the Iraq quagmire nearly three years after withdrawing U.S. troops, with limited air strikes in the past few days against the Islamic State, arises in part because of inertia over Syria.

A failure to arm the mainstream, mostly Sunni, rebellion against Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian rule opened space for the Islamic State, which has now surged back into a broken Iraq, raising its black flag in town after town, the analysts said.

Almost a year ago, in a last-minute change of mind, Obama decided against bombing Assad amid accusations of nerve gas attacks on rebel enclaves. That decision, many believe, has proved costly both in Syria and in neighboring Iraq.

It reinvigorated Assad, helped in the quashing of Syria’s moderate rebels and empowered the militant Islamists who became a recruiting magnet for disenchanted Sunnis in Syria and Iraq.

GROWING CALIPHATE

Well financed and armed, IS insurgents have captured large swathes of territory in a summer offensive, as the Iraqi army – and now Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the self-governing north - have crumbled in the face of its onslaught, massacring Shi'ites and minority Christians and Yazidis as they advance.

The military campaign has been accompanied by a social media blitz showing crucifixions, beheadings and other atrocities. To many, the business of the Islamic State is killing infidels, and it is better at it that any of its forerunners including al Qaeda, which has renounced its offshoot as too brutal.

Interspersed with footage of executions, and the marking out of local minorities for extermination, the message is that the Islamic State does not just preach; it acts mercilessly against its catalog of enemies.

Using captured territory in north and eastern Syria, nearly 35 percent of the country, as its rear base, the IS is now attacking northeastward into Iraqi Kurdistan and even west across the border of Lebanon.

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A militant of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) poses after the militants allegedly se …

Its rapid advances are made possible by the disintegration of Syria and Iraq, alienation of Sunni communities willing to ally even with IS to resist governments they see as under the thumb of Shi’ite Muslims and their sponsor in Iran, and Sunni rage at U.S. and Western policy in the Middle East.

“If you have tens of thousands of people who are willing to fight under its banner, that by itself tells you that the state system itself is really almost in tatters," says Fawaz Gerges, head of the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics.

Obama justified his air strikes as humanitarian, to protect tens of thousands of refugees from the Yazidi community threatened with genocide, and defensive - to thwart any IS advance on Arbil, capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government where U.S. diplomats and special forces might be at risk.

But as Washington starts provisioning poorly armed Peshmerga forces policing a 1,000-km (600-mile) border against the new caliphate, the strategic stakes are becoming clearer. The United States hopes to revitalize the Peshmerga, whose name means those who confront death but who were driven back by the IS onslaught.

The United States has also lined up behind Haidar al-Abadi, a new Iraqi premier to replace its former ally Nuri al-Maliki – spurned by his Iranian backers and most of his own party as a liability whose sectarian policies helped drive Iraq’s Sunni minority into the jihadist camp. The political struggle exposed the treacherous political quicksand Obama now faces.

Dr Hisham al-Hashimi, a Baghdad-based researcher into Iraq’s and the region's armed groups, said the Islamic State has found ways to compensate for its initial lack of manpower, estimated by most analysts at between 10,000 and 15,000 fighters before its rapid advance from Syria into Iraq.

It may be overstretched by its sudden conquest of vast territory but has learned to use fear as a strategic weapon. “The more it terrorizes the people of those areas, the longer it can stay” in control, Hashimi said. “The caliphate exists and is growing now, in an environment where (Sunni opinion) rejects the central government, be that in Iraq or in Syria”.

SOCIAL EPIDEMIC?

In Syria, more than three years of thwarted rebellion against Assad, built around the ruling family’s minority Alawite sect, a heterodox offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, has given the militants a base in the east and north and a following among the brutalized Sunni majority.

In Iraq, the increasingly sectarian rule of Maliki caused anger in the Sunni minority, which held power until the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 deposed Saddam Hussein.

The IS is well-resourced, with young volunteers, cash to buy weapons and pay wages, plus an arsenal of U.S.-supplied heavy weapons it captured from the Iraqi army in June, when it overran the mainly Sunni cities of Mosul and Tikrit.

Aside from funding from sympathizers in the Gulf and tens of millions raised from theft, extortion and kidnapping, the Islamic State has oil. “In eastern Syria IS controls 50 of the 52 oil wells, while in the north and northwest of Iraq there are now 20 oil wells under the control of IS,” Hashimi said.

Many experts cautioned against comparing IS with its predecessor, the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq run by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, which was at the heart of the anti-American insurgency and the Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian blood-letting of 2005-08. Sunni tribes finally rebelled against it.

“These are not just barbarians who came here to steal what they could and then leave,” Hashimi says. “They are now fighting to establish a state, while Zarqawi fought to topple the central government – there is a big difference.”

The new caliphate declared by its Iraqi leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is filling the vacuum of imploding states and, unlike al Qaeda, are establishing a real social base, says Gerges.

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Iraqis chant pro-government slogans and display placards bearing a picture of embattled Prime Minist …

“The al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden was a borderless, transnational movement which has never been able to find a social base. The reason to take the IS ... seriously is because they are like a social epidemic, feeding on sectarian tensions and the social and ideological faultlines in Arab societies," Gerges said, adding that Syria's Nusra Front other militant Islamists were following a similar pattern.

"The phenomenon of the Islamic State is a manifestation of the weakening and dismantling of the Arab state as we know it.”

RECRUITING MAGNET

Gerges also called the militants' spectacular brutality – the crucifixions, stoning of women and now, according to Iraqi ministers, the burying alive of women and children from the Yazidi minority – all publicized over the Internet, as “a strategic choice”.

IS has an extraordinary ability to multiply its numbers by recruiting and indoctrinating volunteers, feeding them their radical brand of Islam and training them militarily.

Mohsen Sazegara, one of the founders of Iran's Revolutionary Guards who is now a U.S.-based dissident, said the emergence of the Islamic State was a reaction by Sunni factions to Maliki and his anti-Sunni policies, which were defended by the Guards.

Maliki, Sazegara said, squandered the inheritance of the Sahwa, the U.S.-funded militia drawn from among the country's Sunni Muslim tribes who were a driving force in fighting al Qaeda predecessors to IS in Iraq after 2006.

The U.S. decision to hand over responsibility for the Sahwa to the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi government in 2009 was a mistake, which alienated them and drove many to join IS ranks.

"U.S. General (David) Petraeus used the tribes in Iraq to fight the al Qaeda predecessors to IS. But Maliki upset the tribes. The hardline pro-Shi’ite policy of Iran and Maliki and those around him led to this Sunni extremism. Islamic State is one manifestation of that,” Sazegara said.

The success of the Islamic State has created a dilemma for all the Muslim neighbors and beyond from Saudi Arabia to Libya.

Riyadh, which until now has seen non-Arab, Shi’ite Iran as ultimately posing the greater threat, is worried that the Islamic State's territorial gains will radicalize Saudis who may eventually target their own government.

The conservative Sunni kingdom was so concerned by the Islamic State's advance in June and July that it moved tens of thousands of troops to the border with Iraq. Yet, Saudi officials say they do not believe the Islamic State is capable of posing any military threat to the mighty Saudi armed forces.

By contrast, they regard Iran and its Shi'ite allies across the region as posing a far more sustained and dangerous threat to the kingdom's position in the Arab and Islamic world.

SAUDI CONCERNS

Since the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated rule, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies have not accepted the rise to power of the Shi’ite majority in Iraq.

Saudi Arabia has a strategic rivalry with Iran over the control of the Gulf but its Wahhabi version of Sunni Orthodoxy has always depicted Shi'ites as heretics and this has a huge resonance inside the kingdom and across the Gulf.

Beyond any strategic rivalry the royal family is careful about contradicting the Wahhabi clerical establishment that underpins the monarchy.

The Islamic State's victories against an Iraqi army run by a Shi'ite government, and against ethnic Kurdish forces seen as having encroached on Arab territory, have engendered a degree of sympathy and admiration among some Saudis, the analysts said.

"The Islamic State's propaganda is that they are fighting the Shi'ites. This is the reason why sometimes some people have sympathy with them. But this sympathy is not substantial. It is only among those who are very extremist," said Mohsen al-Awaji, a reformist Saudi Islamist scholar. "We are very much afraid for our young people, who may believe in this propaganda."

However, most analysts agree that token U.S. air strikes are unlikely to turn the tide. It will be very hard for Washington to succeed unless the new Iraqi government radically addresses Sunni grievances by granting them a real share in power and persuading Sunni tribes to set up a new Sahwa to fight the IS.

Otherwise, the Islamic State will further expand and grow in numbers as it seizes more territory. For the moment, it is the militants who are pulling in the recruits. Video footage of long lines of young men waiting outside IS recruiting offices in Syrian and Iraqi towns shows their popularity.

A Syrian living in an area of Islamic State control near Raqqa, the movement's power base in Syria, said the group has carried out beheadings, levied the "jizya" tax on non-Muslims and settled foreign fighters in homes confiscated from minorities, former government officers and other people.

But despite that, it has still won a degree of respect among locals by, for example, curbing crime using its own version of law of and order. For youths without work, salaries offered by the Islamic State are one of the few sources of income.

The movement seems keen to sow its ideals among the young; one video distributed by the Islamic State features a preacher called Abdallah al-Belgiki - "The Belgian" - who says he traveled from Belgium to the caliphate with his young son.

Against a background of black jihadist flags, he asks the child, aged about 8, whether he would like to go home: "No," he replies. "I want to stay in the Islamic State ... I want to be a jihadi to fight the infidels and the infidels of Europe."

At an IS training camp for boys, one fighter tells the camera: "This generation of children is the generation of the caliphate, this is the generation that will fight the Americans and their allies, the apostates and the infidels."

"The true ideology has been planted in these children."

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Beirut, Salman Raheem, Isra Abdulhadi and Michael Georgy in Baghdad, Babak Dehghanpisheh in Beirut, Angus McDowall in Riyadh, Editing by Peter Millership)

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MALIKIYA, Syria (AP) — In a dusty camp here, Iraqi refugees have new heroes: Syrian Kurdish fighters who battled militants to carve out an escape route for tens of thousands trapped on a mountaintop.

While the U.S. and Iraqi militaries struggle to aid the starving members of Iraq's Yazidi minority with supply drops from the air, the Syrian Kurds took it on themselves to rescue them. The move underlined how they — like Iraqi Kurds — are using the region's conflicts to establish their own rule.

For the past few days, fighters have been rescuing Yazidis from the mountain, transporting them into Syrian territory to give them first aid, food and water, and returning some to Iraq via a pontoon bridge.

The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority who follow an ancient Mesopotamian faith, started to flee to the Sinjar mountain chain on Aug. 2, when militants from the extremist Islamic State group took over their nearby villages. The militants see them as heretics worthy of death.

"The (Kurdish fighters) opened a path for us. If they had not, we would still be stranded on the mountain," said Ismail Rashu, 22, in the Newroz camp in the Syrian Kurdish town of Malikiya some 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the Iraqi border. Families had filled the battered, dusty tents here and new arrivals sat in the shade of rocks, sleeping on blue plastic sheets. Camp officials estimated that at least 2,000 families sought shelter there on Sunday evening.

Nearby, an exhausted woman rocked a baby to sleep. Another sobbed that she abandoned her elderly uncle in their village of Zouraba; he was too weak to walk, too heavy to carry.

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FILE - In this Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014 file photo, displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community settle a …

Many said they hadn't eaten for days on the mountain; their lips were cracked from dehydration and heat, their feet swollen and blackened from walking. Some elderly, disabled and young children were left behind. Others were still walking to where Syrian Kurds were rescuing them, they said.

"We are thankful, from our heads to the sky, to the last day on earth," said Naji Hassan, a Yazidi at the Tigris river border crossing, where thousands of rescued Yazidis were heading back into Iraq on Sunday.

The U.N. estimated around 50,000 Yazidis fled to the mountain. But by Sunday, Kurdish officials said at least 45,000 had crossed through the safe passage, leaving thousands more behind and suggesting the number of stranded was higher.

Syrian Kurds have carved out effective self-rule in the northeastern corner of Syria where they make up the majority. But while members of the ethnic group in both Iraq and Syria pursue their destiny, the two communities are divided by political splits.

Iraq's Kurds, who have managed a self-rule territory for over two decades, are dominated by factions that have built up strong ties with neighboring Turkey. Syria's Kurds, however, are closer to longtime Turkish Kurdish rebels and until the 2011 uprising against President Bashar Assad were firmly under his control.

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FILE - In this Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014 file photo, displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community settle a …

Syrian Kurdish officials said soon after Yazidis fled their villages, they began fighting to create a safe passage. They clashed with Islamic State fighters upon entering Iraq, losing at least 9 fighters, but by Aug. 7 had secured a safe valley passage, cramming Yazidis into jeeps, trucks and cars to bring them some 25 miles (40 kilometers) away. Some of the ill were even rushed to hospital.

"We answered their cries for help. They were in danger and we opened a safe passage for them into safety," said military official Omar Ali. "We saw that we had to help them and protect them; they are Kurds and part of our nation."

In saving Yazidis, Syrian Kurds were also demonstrating their own ambitions for independence as Syria's civil war rages on.

They announced their autonomous area of Rojava in January, and rule several far northeastern Kurdish areas of Syria. Government forces stationed in the area were redeployed over two years ago to battle rebels seeking Assad's overthrow, Syrian Kurdish officials said.

But in entering Iraq, the Syrian fighters are also challenging their Iraqi Kurdish rivals. They say they entered after the Iraqi Kurdish fighting force, called the peshmerga, fled Yazidi villages after short battles with Islamic militants. The peshmerga say they were outgunned by the militants.

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FILE - In this Sunday, Aug. 10, 2014 file photo, displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community settle a …

The U.S. has since assisted the peshmerga fighters with airstrikes, and on Tuesday, a U.S. drone strike destroyed a militant mortar position threatening Kurdish forces defending refugees near the Syrian border. A day earlier, the U.S. said it would provide more weapons directly to Kurdish forces, but it was unclear what materiel was under consideration. Later Tuesday, the Iraqi military said a helicopter delivering aid to the displaced had crashed.

For now, with the peshmerga gone and state aid ineffective, the Yazidis who survived the mountaintop ordeal were counting on the Syrian Kurdish fighters. Covered in dust among crowds at the Tigris crossing, Hassan said without the fighters all would have been lost.

"Were it not for them, no Yazidi would be saved," he said.

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Mroue reported from Beirut.

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Syrian Kurds step in to aid refugees trapped on a mountaintop where U.S. and Iraqi forces have struggled to help.
Political implications

BEIRUT (AP) — Islamic militants have crushed a tribal uprising against their rule in eastern Syria after three days of clashes in a string of villages near the border with Iraq, killing and beheading opponents along the way, activists said Monday.

The fighters from the al-Qaida breakaway Islamic State group control huge swaths of territory in eastern and northern Syria and are fighting rival rebels, Kurdish militias and the Syrian army for more territory.

Meanwhile, at least 10 people including four children and two women were killed Monday when Syrian forces dropped explosives-filled barrels from a helicopter over the Bab Nayrab district of Aleppo in northern Syria, activists said. Many others were buried under the rubble of buildings, they said.

The Syrian army regularly dropped the so-called barrel bombs over populated areas in rebel-held territory. Aleppo, once Syria's commercial capital, has seen heavy fighting since rebels seized part of the city in 2012.

The civil war in Syria, now in its fourth year, has continued to bleed while attention has shifted to conflicts in Gaza and Iraq. The Islamic State group, which consists mainly of foreign fighters, has taken over much of northern and eastern Syria as well as western and northern Iraq.

The group has declared a self-styled caliphate in territory it controls along the Iraqi-Syrian border, imposing a harsh interpretation of Islamic law.

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This image posted by the Raqqa Media Center shows fighters from the Islamic State group on top of a …

The armed revolt by the Shueitat tribe in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour was the first sign of local resistance by tribesmen to the Islamic State group since its fighters swept into the province.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Turkey-based activist Thaer al-Deiri said Monday that Islamic State group fighters regained control of three villages from the Shueitat tribe after being expelled earlier this month.

The Observatory said Islamic State fighters beheaded two tribesmen after they fled to the nearby village of Shaafa. It had no immediate word on other casualties in the area.

Clashes over the past two weeks left more than a dozen people dead and both sides.

The clashes in eastern Syria came as Islamic State fighters tightened their siege of a major military air base in the town of Tabqa in the northern province of Raqqa. The air base is the last army position in the Raqqa province that is an Islamic State stronghold.

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FILE - This undated file photo posted by the Raqqa Media Center, a Syrian opposition group, on Monda …

The Observatory's chief Rami Abdurrahman said the group was bombarding the base with artillery and appears to be preparing to storm it.

Last week, Islamic State fighters seized the nearby Brigade 93 base after days of heavy fighting. Late last month they captured another base in which they took dozens of prisoners, some of whom were later beheaded and their bodies paraded in one of Raqqa's main squares.

Syria's conflict began in March 2011 as a popular uprising against President Bashar Assad's rule, but turned into an insurgency after government forces violently cracked down on demonstrators. It has since deteriorated into a civil war with sectarian overtones. Over 170,000 people have been killed in Syria in over three years of fighting, activists say.

In neighboring Lebanon, former Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced he was donating $15 million of his own money for the reconstruction of a border town that was overrun by Syria-based Sunni extremists last week.

Hariri told a visiting delegation from the eastern town of Arsal Monday that the money would go for the construction of schools, hospitals and other projects. The militants withdrew from Arsal on Thursday after fierce clashes with the Lebanese army that went on for five days.

Hariri, considered Lebanon's most influential Sunni Muslim politician, returned Friday after three years of self-imposed exile. His surprise return home was seen as a bid to reassert his leadership over Sunnis in Lebanon amid growing concern that many in the community are being radicalized by the increasingly sectarian war next door.

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AP writer Zeina Karam in Beirut contributed to this report.

Associated Press Videos
As refugees flee, U.S. sends arms to Iraqi Kurds

CAMP PENDLETON, California (AP) — Another 130 U.S. troops arrived in Iraq on Tuesday on what the Pentagon described as a temporary mission to assess the scope of the humanitarian crisis facing thousands of displaced Iraqi civilians trapped on Sinjar Mountain and evaluate options for getting them out to safety.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced the deployment in remarks to Marines at this Southern California base on the final stop of a week-long, around-the-world trip that also took him to India, Germany and Australia.

"This is not a combat boots on the ground kind of operation," Hagel said. "We're not going back into Iraq in any of the same combat mission dimensions that we once were in in Iraq," he added, referring to the eight-year war that cost more than 4,400 U.S. lives and soured the American public on military involvement in Iraq.

Another defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide additional details on the sensitive mission, said the extra troops were Marines and special operations forces whose mission was to assess the situation in the Sinjar area and to develop additional humanitarian assistance options beyond current U.S. efforts there. Still another official said the mission for the 130 troops could last less than one week.

That official also said that while the troops were not being sent in to execute some type of rescue mission of the Yazidis on the mountain, they would assess the feasibility of a rescue or what one might look like. The also would assist in the ongoing effort to evaluate the use of airstrikes as part of the mission to protect the Yazidis from attacks by the Islamic State militants.

Hagel referred to the 130 as "assessors."

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Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing violence from forces loyal to the Islamic St …

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The additional troops arrived Tuesday in the city of Irbil, well east of Sinjar. They were to work with representatives of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to coordinate plans with international partners and non-government organizations to help the trapped Yazidi civilians on Sinjar Mountain.

"They will make a very rapid and critical assessment because we understand it's urgent to try to move those people off the mountain," Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters traveling with him in Honiara, Solomon Islands.

The move shows the Obama administration is weighing the impact and implications of several days of targeted airstrikes on the Islamic State fighters and how that has affected U.S.-backed Kurdish forces opposing them in northern Iraq.

President Barack Obama has said repeatedly he will not send ground combat forces back into Iraq.

One immediate dilemma was the fate of thousands of displaced Yazidis in the Sinjar area who have been provided with food and water delivered by U.S. cargo planes in recent days. Washington also was considering how to increase its military assistance to the Kurds, whose militia is outgunned by the militants.

Official: 130 Advisers Heading To Northern IraqPlay Video

On Tuesday night, U.S. Central Command said four U.S. Air Force cargo planes dropped 108 bundles of food and water intended for Iraqi civilians stranded on Sinjar Mountain. It was the sixth such humanitarian relief mission conducted by U.S. planes since last week.

The 130 were in addition to 90 U.S. military advisers already in Baghdad and 160 in a pair of operations centers — one in Irbil and one in Baghdad — working with Iraqi security forces. They were in addition to about 455 U.S. security forces and 100 military personnel working in the Office of Security Cooperation in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

U.S. officials said that while Obama put caps on the number of troops deployed to Iraq, these latest forces were being sent under the authorization for humanitarian assistance and therefore did not exceed the limits.

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Burns reported from Washington.

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U.S. to send 130 more troops to Iraq

Officials will focus on several issues, including the fate of thousands of refugees trapped by Islamic State militants.
Situation dire

JERUSALEM (AP) — An Israeli military tactic that allows overwhelming fire to stop the capture of soldiers — even at the risk of killing them — is facing criticism after its use in the Gaza war killed some 100 Palestinians.

The military used the "Hannibal Procedure" after soldiers feared militants had captured an officer, unleashing heavy shelling on the southern Gaza town of Rafah. Now, a group is calling on the military to abandon the practice, saying it puts captured soldiers at unreasonable risk and can lead to civilian deaths.

In an army with a strong ethos of "no soldier left behind," there is a near obsession with preventing the abduction of Israeli troops, in part because past cases have ended in painful, lopsided prisoner exchanges after years of protracted negotiations. New recruits learn that if they see a soldier being captured and rushed away in a car, they should shoot at the vehicle to stop its progress, even if it risks the soldier's life.

The "Hannibal Procedure" was designed in the mid-1980s by Yossi Peled, then head of Israel's Northern Command, after Hezbollah guerrillas captured two soldiers in southern Lebanon.

The actual order was drafted along with two of his top staff officers, Col. Gabi Ashkenazi, who later became the Israeli military chief, and Col. Yaakov Amidror, who recently ended a term as Israel's national security adviser. Hannibal was a legendary military commander who battled the ancient Romans, though officials say the name was selected randomly by a computer.

Peled declined to comment, but Amidror stood behind a rationale he said was often misinterpreted. He said it gives young soldiers on the ground clear guidelines for such a situation.

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FILE - In this Saturday, Aug. 2, 2014 file photo, Palestinians look for their belonging after houses …

"The order is that you cannot kill the soldier, but you can endanger him. A soldier in that situation knows he is in danger anyway," he said. "How is it any different than giving a soldier an order to charge forward into live fire? You are also putting his life in danger that way. That's what soldiers do."

However, its application in the Gaza war has angered critics who say it may have led to the deaths of scores of Palestinians on Aug. 1, when Israeli soldiers feared militants had captured Lt. Hadar Goldin.

Hamas fire killed Goldin and two other Israeli soldiers near Rafah, along Gaza's southern border with Egypt, shortly after an internationally brokered cease-fire took effect.

According to Israeli media reports, three bodies were found at the scene shortly after the ambush, but upon closer inspection troops realized that one of them was a Hamas militant disguised in an Israeli uniform — raising fears that Hamas had captured Goldin.

That's when "Hannibal" allegedly went into effect, with Israel unleashing a massive barrage of airstrikes and artillery fire aimed at blocking any potential escape routes of the kidnappers. Defying protocol, a fellow officer rushed into one of the tunnels and found some personal effects belonging to Goldin that helped the military later rule him dead.

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FILE - In this Saturday, Aug. 2, 2014 file photo, a Palestinian looks for his belongings after a hou …

The military would not officially confirm whether "Hannibal" was enacted after Goldin's disappearance, but multiple officials say the rare order was given. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists.

The heavy shelling leveled the area in Rafah, killing some 100 Palestinians, Palestinian health officials say. They could not offer a breakdown of the number of civilians and militants killed.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a prominent rights group, asked the government this week to strike down the doctrine and investigate its use.

"A protocol that puts the life of the captured soldier in jeopardy to thwart a kidnapping is fundamentally unacceptable," ACRI wrote to Israel's attorney general on Monday. "Implementing this protocol in populated areas, wherein the soldier and his captors are surrounded by a civilian population that is not taking part in hostilities, is strictly prohibited."

Israel's Justice Ministry declined to comment, merely saying it received the letter.

The fear of being captured runs deep in Israeli society, where military service is mandatory for most Jewish males. Islamic militant groups have put a premium on capturing soldiers. When they have succeeded, they have not extended international prisoner of war rights, preventing visits from the Red Cross and keeping word of their captives' status secret.

Asa Kasher, a philosophy professor who authored the military's official code of conduct in the 1990s, said the "Hannibal Procedure" has been grossly misunderstood and strikes a delicate balance between protecting the lives of soldiers and carrying out military responsibilities. Much of the directive remains classified, but Kasher stressed the conventional wisdom of a "dead soldier being better than a captive soldier" was a fallacy.

"That is just an awful saying and totally untrue. It goes against every value of the" Israeli military, he said.

However, Tamar Feldman, an ACRI lawyer, said the practice violates the potential captive's human rights. When employed in a crowded area like Gaza, it raised even more questions.

"A command that subjugates the life of a soldier to an unknown political gain ... is both cynical and revolting," she wrote. "Activating this protocol in the heart of an urban and civilian environment is particularly grave; it shakes the foundations of law and morality and must be absolutely condemned."

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Follow Aron Heller on Twitter at www.twitter.com/aronhellerap.