How the American Withdrawal from Syria Confirmed the Worst Predictions — and Exposed New Threats

 Analysis based on a January 2026 survey conducted by the Dor Moria Analytical Center under the Haifa Format project. Sample: 1,009 respondents, nationally representative of the Israeli population. Margin of error: ±3.1% at 95% confidence level.

One of the most dangerous moments in national security planning is not when threats intensify, but when societies misread the threat landscape. A month ago, the Dor Moria Analytical Center examined the gap between Israeli public perception and geopolitical reality. When asked which state could neutralize the Turkish threat, 55% of respondents named the United States; only 6.4% pointed to Russia.[1] When asked about the future of the buffer zone in Syria, just 4.7% considered the deployment of Russian forces there a possibility.

January 2026 revealed the cost of that gap — not in abstractions, but in the rapid reordering of Syria’s balance of power and Israel’s deterrence calculus.

From Plans to Catastrophe: The Kurdish Collapse

In December, we asked: “The U.S. is planning to withdraw its forces. Who will fill the vacuum?” The concern was straightforward: a drawdown of the roughly 2,000 American troops in northeastern Syria — announced as a phased repositioning — would remove the security umbrella that had allowed the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to hold territory, guard ISIS detainees, and control oil-producing regions. The answer came faster than expected — and it was worse than any forecast.

In the space of two weeks in January, the Syrian Democratic Forces — America’s allies for a decade, the force that destroyed the ISIS caliphate — ceased to function as an independent military actor. The provinces of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor were lost. Oil fields fell under Damascus’s control. The Kurds were pushed back into Hasakah province, their historic heartland.[2]

The cost of this defeat extends beyond territory. Estimates of ISIS fighters who escaped from Kurdish-guarded prisons range from 200 to 1,500 — the wide spread reflecting the gap between Pentagon assessments and open-source reporting, with no independent verification yet possible. Separately, the Pentagon facilitated the transfer of more than 7,000 suspected ISIS detainees to Iraqi custody — a move characterized by U.S. officials as an emergency measure to prevent mass jailbreaks. Senators Graham and McCaul have warned of a potential caliphate resurgence.

The January 20 agreement drew the final line: SDF fighters are to be integrated into the Syrian army individually — not as a formation, but as separate persons. This was not merely a cartographic change. The political formalization of the collapse effectively dismantled Kurdish autonomy,........

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