Washington D.C. National Guard Shootings: Did the CIA Import Its Own Assassin?
What is publicly known today is already unsettling enough. Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghan who allegedly murdered one National Guard soldier and critically wounded another two blocks from the White House, spent roughly a decade inside one of the CIA’s most secretive Afghan paramilitary programs — the Kandahar Strike Force (NDS-03), commonly referred to inside the Agency as a “Zero Unit.”
These units were not regular Afghan army. They were trained, equipped, paid, and often directly tasked by the CIA, operating with far fewer rules than even U.S. Special Forces. Multiple human-rights reports accused Zero Units of extrajudicial killings, torture, and night raids that sometimes killed entire families.
When Kabul fell in August 2021, Lakanwal was not processed through the normal refugee pipeline. He was evacuated on a CIA-coordinated flight and granted humanitarian parole under Operation Allies Welcome — a status normally reserved for interpreters and others with documented U.S. government service.
His parole expired in 2023–2024, making him technically removable, yet no deportation case was ever opened against him. In April 2025 he was granted asylum in a closed immigration hearing and remained legally in the country with a pending green-card application.
On 26 November 2025 he drove approximately 2,700 miles from Washington State to Washington, D.C., purchased ammunition en route, and allegedly carried out a deliberate ambush on uniformed National Guard troops while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
The foregoing timeline is not from some conspiracy theorist’s vivid imagination — it is derived from the undisputed public record. Yet these known facts leave a series of questions that no official has yet answered satisfactorily: why was an individual who spent ten years in one of the CIA’s most deniable, violent units fast-tracked into the United States while tens of thousands of other Afghan allies with cleaner records languished for years — or were denied entirely?
And once his humanitarian parole expired, why was no removal proceeding ever initiated, even though ICE routinely deports far less controversial cases? Was someone inside the government still protecting him?
Zero Units were not only fought the Taliban; in their final years they were increasingly used for domestic political missions inside Afghanistan (intimidation, disappearances, election interference on behalf of CIA-favored governors). When those networks collapsed in 2021, many members had enemies on all sides. Bringing such individuals to the United States has always carried obvious risks. Who made the risk-acceptance decision, and on what basis?
CIA Director Ratcliffe’s own words — “This individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here” — imply that even the current leadership believes the original vetting decision was catastrophically wrong. If the Director of Central Intelligence now says the man should never have been admitted, who overruled standard procedures to bring him in 2021 and then kept him here after his legal status lapsed?
Finally, and most uncomfortably: paramilitary assets trained for a decade to conduct covert killings do not usually “go rogue” without some triggering event. Was Lakanwal radicalized after arrival (the official line), or had he always carried divided loyalties that his CIA handlers either missed or chose to ignore?
None of this proves a deliberate plot.
But when an agency that specializes in plausible deniability evacuates one of its own long-term killers, places him on American soil, shields him from normal immigration enforcement for years, and then watches him travel unimpeded across the continent to murder U.S. troops in the nation’s capital, it is not irrational to ask whether something far darker than simple incompetence is at work.
The American public has been told this was a “vetting failure.”
The known facts, however, raise the legitimate — and deeply disturbing — possibility that it was something else entirely.
We recognize that the investigations are only beginning. But the country deserves answers that go beyond press-release assurances, all the way to who exactly decided Rahmanullah Lakanwal belonged on American streets in the first place, to why no one ever reversed that terrible decision.
The victim’s background has drawn deep attention: according to his obituary and multiple news reports, Borkum once worked as a computer consultant on the 77th floor of the North Tower at the World Trade Center — a job that ended in late July 2001, narrowly sparing him from the 9/11 attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives, including many of his former colleagues. At the time of his death, Borkum — a widower — had reportedly been living on the streets of downtown Jacksonville. The case has ignited a broader conversation about youth violence and protections for unhoused people in Jacksonville. Community members and local advocates have called the killing “senseless” — a stark reminder of how vulnerable homeless individuals can be, and how young some violent offenders have become. 
