The man suspected of shooting two National Guard members near the White House this week — one of them fatally — is an Afghan national who came to the United States in September 2021 because of his work with the U.S. government, including the CIA, according to authorities.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, who officials say drove across the country to carry out Wednesday’s attack, was detained moments after opening fire on Sarah Beckstrom, 20, an Army specialist from West Virginia, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24 on Wednesday. Beckstrom later died of her injuries, while Wolfe remains critically injured, President Donald Trump said the following day.
Lakanwal has been charged with three counts of assault with intent to kill while armed and three counts of possession of a firearm during a crime of violence. Here’s what we know so far.
He had worked with the U.S. government, including the CIA
Lakanwal first came to the U.S. as part of Operation Allies Welcome, a Biden-era program created to help resettle Afghan nationals after the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said Lakanwal was a member of a partner force in Kandahar, a province in southern Afghanistan that saw significant fighting during the war.
Lakanwal was part of one of the CIA’s “Zero Units” that were involved in combat missions to seize or kill suspected terrorists, according to several people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation.
Further details about his specific role and service with the CIA are not yet known.
The Zero Units were involved in anti-terror raids
The Zero Units, also known as National Strike Units, were involved in dangerous and often deadly night raids and other missions to kill or capture members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. The CIA and U.S. military provided intelligence and logistical support to the squads.
The CIA has never publicly acknowledged its work with the Zero Units, which have been shadowed by allegations of human rights violations, including a 2019 Human Rights Watch report that found they had conducted summary executions and other abuses.
Lakanwal and other Afghan paramilitary members would have undergone extensive vetting before joining the Zero Units and were supposed to be monitored closely once in service, people familiar with the matter said.
U.S. officials have said the Zero Units were effective fighters and that they played a critical role in assisting with the chaotic American evacuation from Afghanistan in late August 2021, probably saving U.S. lives.
Lakanwal was described as a polite neighbor
Neighbors interviewed Thursday in Bellingham, which is in the far northwest corner of Washington state, said that Lakanwal had lived with his wife and five children in a second-floor unit in the apartment building for about a year. Several neighbors said they had little contact with Lakanwal but would see him in passing, often coming home late at night. They described him as polite.
Another neighbor, Mohammed Sherzad, who is also from Afghanistan, said Lakanwal was Pashtun. The two attended the same nearby mosque, he said, and their children attended elementary school together. He said he hadn’t seen Lakanwal in recent weeks.
Advocacy groups condemned attack, said it did not reflect wider Afghan community in the U.S.
After announcing the death of Beckstrom on Thursday, Trump threatened to halt migration “from all Third World Countries,” while the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the government has stopped processing all immigration requests for Afghan nationals “pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”
The Alliance of Afghan Communities in the United States, a network of advocacy groups representing Afghans in the United States, condemned the shooting while also asking the Trump administration to punish the perpetrator rather than the community as a whole.
In the statement, the group’s members wrote that the shooting represented “a Single Individual Not the Afghan Nation” and said they stand in “deep solidarity with the American people during this painful and tragic moment.”
“We urge the American public not to judge thousands of innocent Afghans based on the actions of a single person,” the group said. “This was an individual act of moral deviation, not the reflection of a nation.”
“During my service in Afghanistan, every day we lived, ate and fought with some incredible Afghan patriots who saw the U.S. as indispensable in their fight for survival,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who served as an intelligence community base chief in eastern Afghanistan.
“I recall after a ferocious firefight, in which our Afghan indigenous partners put a real hurt on the Taliban, a senior U.S. military officer asked me about the prowess of our allies,” he said. “My response was simple and to me, quite truthful. I stated that our partners constituted the finest fighting force in eastern Afghanistan, who we trusted with our lives each and every day.”
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