The suspected Afghan terrorist accused of gunning down National Guard troops just blocks from the White House struggled for years with the violence he saw as a part of a notorious CIA-backed paramilitary group in his home country, according to a longtime friend.
“When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it,” said a childhood friend of 29-year-old terror suspect Rahmanullah Lakanwal.
“It put a lot of pressure on his mind,” the friend told the New York Times.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal struggled for years with the violence he committed as part of a CIA-backed “Zero Unit” force in his home country. REUTERS
Lakanwal was part of an elite group of Afghan fighters known as the “Zero Units” — or alternatively, “death squads” — which battled the Taliban alongside US forces for over a decade.
The father of five settled in Bellingham, Washington, after he fled the Afghistan following the Biden Administration’s disastrous 2021 pullout.
Lakanwal’s role within the Zero Units remains unclear, but he reportedly joined as a security guard in 2012 when he would have been about 16 years old, one of his cousins told the Associated Press.
He remained in the group for nearly 10 years and was reportedly promoted to a team leader and a GPS specialist along the way, and only left the group in 2021 as US forces haphazardly pulled out of the country.
Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe and Specialist Sarah Beckstrom were shot by Lakanwal just blocks from the White House. Beckstrom later died of her wounds. AP
But whatever he did in that time reportedly exacted a heavy toll.
“He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure,” Lakanwal’s childhood friend told the Times.
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Those pressures led to spiraling mental health, the friend said, with Lakanwal apparently trying to cope by abusing substances like marijuana.
Lakanwal was in such a state towards the end of his time with his Zero Unit in 2021 that he got married to his second wife and divorced her within days, the friend said.
National Guard members walk near a cordoned-off area after two National Guard members were reportedly shot near the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 26, 2025. REUTERS
Though Zero Units were part of the Afghan government’s intelligence agency, they were trained, recruited, equipped – and even paid – by the CIA and US special operations forces, Rolling Stone magazine reported.
That meant they were fighting among the best of the best — and were trained to be deadly-effective in covert operations and high-stakes nighttime raids across Afghanistan’s remote countryside.
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But the group also gained a reputation for extreme violence, with stories of family executions, torture and indiscriminate civilian killings following in their wake.
“They are illustrative of a larger pattern of serious laws-of-war violations — some amounting to war crimes — that extends to all provinces in Afghanistan where these paramilitary forces operate with impunity,” Human Rights Watch wrote in a 2019 report.
Beckstrom ultimately died from the attack on Thursday. Facebook / Sarah Beckstrom
In one alleged incident, five members of a single family were executed at once. In another, one Zero Unit was accused of killing over 50 civilians across a series of raids, according to The Intercept.
Such stories earned the Zero Units a nickname, “Death Squads,” with Human Rights Watch alleging they were behind numerous “extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances.”
Despite Lakanwal’s reported breakdown, he relocated to the US under former President Joe Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome, which relocated nearly 80,000 Afghans to the US.
About 10,000 of them had been members of the Zero Units, and mostly settled in the Seattle area as Lakanwal did.
Wolfe still remains in critical condition from the attack. Andrew Wolfe / Facebook
In Bellingham he lived with his wife — who was often seen in a hijab — and kids in a 2,000-a-month apartment, where neighbors said he and his family were quiet.
One neighbor told The Post that he played Call of Duty in the family’s sparsely funished apartment — which had no beds, but only couch cushions for sleeping.
He drove across the country in an Hydundai sedan sometime earlier this week. In Washington DC on Wednesday afternoon, he allegedly ambushed and gunned down two National Guard troops patrolling just blocks from the White House.
One of those guard troops was shot in the head, and both were left in gravely critical condition.
It’s unclear why Lakanwal allegedly turned against the nation that paid him and took him in — but his unit was known of its unsparing loyalty.
Despite the Zero Units gaining a reputation for radicalizing civilians with its tactics, its own ranks were notably free of internal dissent – with not a single unit having an Afghan member turn on US troops during the war, according to Rolling Stone.
That has been attributed to a heavy vetting process, which barred anybody from joining unless their loyalty was vouched for by a family member or close friend already inside.
Lakanwal’s brother was reportedly a commander of the same Zero Unit he joined when he was apparently just a teenager.
The CIA has vehemently denied the stories of Zero Unit’s violence, insisting they are little more than Taliban propaganda.