Locals Say National Guard Shooter Was Imprisoned in Afghanistan After “Zero Unit” Killings

Before D.C. shooter Rahmanullah Lakanwal attacked two National Guard members last week, he was part of a CIA-backed unit that killed many Afghans.

A military transport plane takes off while Afghans are stranded outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan on August 23, 2021. Photo: MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES via Getty.

Story by Emran Feroz and Abdul Rahman Lakanwal

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who was arrested for shooting two National Guard soldiers last week in D.C., was briefly imprisoned in Afghanistan alongside other members of his Zero Unit team, according to five Afghan sources. The detention by local government forces came after Zero Units killed Afghan police forces in Kandahar they were supposed to be defending.

Notwithstanding their arrests, there were no longterm consequences for the Zero Units; the Afghan state had no authority over them and the Americans shielded them. During his few days in prison, which Lakanwal and his comrades had to face after the incident in Kandahar, they still received their pay from the CIA, sources said.

The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

The deadly assault last week near the White House was like a scene drawn from the world that the suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, once inhabited in Afghanistan and which was shaped by the U.S.-led War on Terror during the last two decades. He allegedly targeted two National Guard soldiers in an ambush outside the Farragut West Metro station in Washington, D.C. One of them, Sarah Beckstrom, has since died, while the second remains in critical condition. President Donald Trump condemned the attack as an “act of terror” and blamed his predecessor, Joe Biden, for evacuating Lakanwal to the United States in 2021 during the chaotic NATO withdrawal and the Taliban’s return. Lakanwal is facing murder charges.

The Afghan father of five was not a simple interpreter or contractor, like many of the thousands evacuated at that time. He belonged to a notorious militia created by the CIA at the height of the War on Terror: the so-called Zero Units. These forces operated in several regions of Afghanistan; in his home province of Khost, parallel structures like the Khost Protection Force (KPF) did the same. Together they formed a network of loyal proxies that the CIA relied on for night raids, intelligence work, and counterinsurgency, often operating far beyond any legal or moral boundaries.

“A lot of these men just did what they wanted with impunity,” said Noor ul-Hadi, a resident of the country’s Nangarhar province where many Zero Units once operated. In 2012, Abdul Hadi Mohmand, Noor ul-Hadi’s own father, was killed in a night-raid conducted by both U.S. soldiers and Afghan militiamen. Mohmand worked for the local government and was not part of any extremist group. “Like many other families with a similar fate, we couldn’t do anything against his murder,” Noor ul-Hadi recalled.

Sources in Lakanwal’s home district of Lakan say that his unit did not only operate in Khost but also carried out operations in Kandahar, where they committed war crimes. One of Lakanwal’s ID cards, which has been published during the last days, also says that he used to be part of the U.S.-backed “Kandahar Strike Force,” another branding of the Zero Unit stationed in the province back then. According to several people from Lakanwal’s neighboring village, members of his unit were notorious criminals. Another man from Khost City, who knew Lakanwal personally and asked to remain anonymous, claims that his unit regularly raided random villages and that some members were not happy about killing “fellow Afghans” without any proof of their Taliban background.

“Overall, they did what the Americans ordered them and they were free to do anything else too,” he told Drop Site News. Militias like the Zero Units and the KPF also assisted the Americans in airstrikes and were granted the authorization to order them by themselves. In many cases, civilians were bombed. “They told us to leave and declared our killed family members as terrorists”, a member of a local nomad tribe said. Six of his family members were killed in June 2015 by an American drone strike. In total, 14 civilians were murdered. After the massacre, KPF fighters appeared and secured the area.

According to local sources from Lakanwal’s district, operations by the Zero Units even killed high-ranking Afghan policemen working for the same U.S.-allied government they were ostensibly defending. “In one case, the CIA-backed units had a dispute with policemen about the handling of Taliban prisoners,” one local from Khost told Drop Site News. “It resulted in a brutal fight with several dead men.” None of Drop Site’s sources could put an exact date on the incident, though all said it happened sometime since 2018.

Afterward, Lakanwal and other members of the Zero Unit team were imprisoned for a few days, but faced no further repercussions, the sources said.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations have extensively documented Zero Unit abuses: torture, forced disappearances, summary executions of “terror suspects,” and intimidation campaigns against journalists and monitors. Journalists (including myself) and human rights advocates were often denied access to their areas of operation. But in several raids later documented by journalists in Wardak or Nangarhar province, Zero Unit members allegedly carried out wholesale massacres of families, including young children. The brutality they used frequently surpassed the Taliban and fueled resentment against the U.S.-backed government that was ignored until its collapse.

These militias answered exclusively to their U.S. military and intelligence handlers and were not overseen by the civilian government. They were also not part of Afghanistan’s military or intelligence hierarchy—the fragile institutions of the now-collapsed republic had no jurisdiction over them. “Not even the president can act against these men,” locals in Khost told one of the authors of this piece back in 2017 when he visited the region.

Frustration about the Zero Units and KPF’s abuses had been mounting for years before the government finally collapsed in 2021 and was replaced by the Taliban. “The way these men were chosen was very different from what we faced within the army. In fact, the Americans just focused on their physical strength. They didn’t care about their potential criminal background, mental health or their widespread drug abuses,” said Mohammad Rafeh, a former commander of the disbanded Afghan National Army. Contrary to regular Afghan soldiers, members of the Zero Units received much higher salaries and better fighting gear. “Sometimes they even acted like Americans. That’s how privileged they were,” Rafeh recalled.

When the Taliban returned to Kabul in August 2021, the era of CIA-backed militias was over. Yet in Washington, loyalty was more highly valued than accountability. During the final days of the U.S. withdrawal, Zero Unit fighters secured the perimeter at Kabul airport—once again using methods they knew best. Witnesses described them beating back the desperate crowds at the gates and, in some cases, acting as smugglers: several Afghans reported being charged thousands of dollars by Zero Unit members for passage to the “other side.”

In return, the CIA prioritized the evacuation of Zero Unit members and their families, flying as many as 7,000 to safety, even as many other Afghans aligned with the government were left to their fate under the Taliban. The process of moving the Zero Unit members abroad involved minimal vetting or oversight.

“Most of them had to restart in the United States, which wasn’t an easy step for them. One cousin of mine who used to work for the KPF started as a truck driver in Texas. But he grew up in war and knew nothing else,” said Mohammad Ayoub, an Afghan from Khost province who now lives in Germany. In addition to the psychological impact of war, resettled members of the units, many of whom drew from rural Pashtun areas, faced difficulties integrating with the more urbanized Afghan diaspora already in the U.S.

Lakanwal’s own struggles haunted him in his new country. Multiple sources from Khost and from the U.S. say that he had long shown signs of significant psychological instability and drug use, even before he left Afghanistan. According to reports, he worked as an Amazon Flex delivery driver in the U.S., but the trauma of his past shaped his daily life.

According to former militia commander Rafeh—who is still living, in hiding, in Afghanistan—the circumstances that shaped Lakanwal were common among resettled militia veterans. “Many former soldiers and militiamen lived for the war and experienced trauma. It’s not compatible with their new lives in Europe or in Northern America. Also, their former NATO allies are abandoning them more and more. Many still don’t have documents while their family members are forced to hide themselves in Afghanistan”, Rafeh said. “If they are also traumatized drug addicts like Lakanwal, they are literal time bombs created through American warfare itself.”

Back in Khost, Lakanwal’s family has now withdrawn completely. Neighbors say they refuse to speak to anyone and no longer attend the local mosque. Their silence reflects the deep stigma attached to both the Zero Units and the violence they left behind. Meanwhile, in the United States, former militiamen fear deportation under Donald Trump’s restrictive migration policies—back to the Taliban emirate they had fought for years on behalf of Washington.

Emran Feroz is an Austrian-Afghan journalist based in Germany. He covered the U.S.-led War on Terror and the crimes of the Zero Units and other CIA-backed militias for more than a decade.

Abdul Rahman Lakanwal is an Afghan journalist and former television presenter. He is not related to Rahmanullah Lakanwal, but hails from the same district: Lakan in the southeastern province of Khost, Afghanistan.