Some stories hit so close to the seat of power that they feel scripted for a thriller novel. This one isn’t.
Two National Guard soldiers doing routine duty just blocks from the White House are suddenly fighting for their lives. The man who allegedly pulled the trigger? An Afghan national who, only a few years ago, was celebrated as an American ally in the war on terror. Now the internet researchers are piecing together a trail that leads from dusty battlefields in Kandahar straight into the heart of Washington’s resettlement machine — and some very uncomfortable questions are starting to surface.
A Shooting That Shocked the Nation’s Capital
It was supposed to be another quiet evening in late November. National Guard troops had been posted around federal buildings for months — a lingering reminder of heightened security concerns. Then, without warning, gunfire erupted.
One soldier dead. Another clinging to life. The suspect, identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was taken into custody at the scene. Within hours the FBI announced they were treating the incident as potential terrorism. By morning, everyone’s phone was blowing up with the same basic facts — and a growing list of very troubling details.
From Ally to Alleged Attacker
Here’s where things get complicated. Multiple sources inside the intelligence community have confirmed that Lakanwal wasn’t just some random refugee who slipped through the cracks.
He spent over a decade working with a CIA-supported counterterrorism unit in Afghanistan. We’re talking about one of those elite strike forces that operated in the shadows — the kind of outfit that officially doesn’t exist on paper but was extremely effective at taking out high-value targets. Senior officials described him as “good at what he did.” His biometrics were in our system. We knew exactly who he was.
So how does someone with that background end up shooting American soldiers on American soil?
“He was good at what he did.”
— Senior U.S. intelligence official speaking on background
The Resettlement Pipeline Everyone Trusted
When Kabul fell in 2021, the United States airlifted tens of thousands of Afghans out of the country. Many had worked directly with American forces and faced genuine danger from the Taliban. The evacuation was chaotic, emotional, and — let’s be honest — politically necessary.
But chaos creates blind spots.
Thousands of people were vetted in days or even hours. Background checks that should have taken months were compressed into minutes. The priority was speed, not perfection. And organizations that normally handle refugee resettlement were suddenly dealing with numbers they’d never seen before.
Lakanwal and his family — wife and five children — made it onto one of those flights. They landed in the United States, went through processing, and eventually settled in Washington state. A nice couple in Bellingham even hosted them for a while and started a (now-deleted) GoFundMe to help the family get on their feet.
Enter the Internet Detectives
While official sources stayed quiet, the online research community went to work. And what they found raises eyebrows.
Someone located what appears to be Lakanwal’s professional resume. One line stands out: employment with a major international humanitarian organization that has received hundreds of millions in U.S. government contracts for refugee resettlement.
That same organization has a history that makes conspiracy researchers salivate:
- Its current president is a former British Foreign Secretary whose office once oversaw MI6
- Past leadership includes former Assistant Secretaries of State and directors of U.S. government-funded broadcasting operations
- It has received awards from organizations widely viewed as intelligence-adjacent
- Major funding streams trace back to both government sources and controversial private donors
Look, I’m not here to throw around wild accusations. Plenty of legitimate humanitarian groups have former government officials on their boards — it’s practically a rite of passage in DC. But when those connections pile up around a case this sensitive, people notice.
A Ghost in the System?
Another strange detail: researchers couldn’t find any business registry hits for Lakanwal in Afghanistan. For someone who supposedly ran operations and worked at a high level, that’s… odd.
People in that world usually leave some kind of paper trail — contracts, payroll, tax records, something. The absence feels deliberate. Almost as if someone was designed to be hard to track once they left the battlefield.
Perhaps the simplest explanation is that sensitive programs scrub public records to protect their people. Perhaps. Or perhaps we’re seeing the limits of trying to transplant entire shadow war infrastructures into suburban America.
The Bigger Picture Nobody Wants to Discuss
Let’s zoom out for a second.
Over the past four years, millions of people have entered the United States under various emergency and humanitarian programs. The vetting standards applied to Afghans in 2021 were, by necessity, different from peacetime norms. Intelligence officials have been ringing alarm bells — publicly and privately — about terrorist watch-list hits among new arrivals for years.
Most of those individuals are probably harmless. Many are genuine refugees who deserved a chance. But it only takes one.
We have more than 10,000 Islamist terrorists on our soil, and they cannot keep looking the other way.
— Former CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams, November 2025
When that one person has specialized military training, intimate knowledge of American tactics, and possible residual loyalty to causes we thought we’d defeated — the stakes change dramatically.
What Happens Next?
The investigation is ongoing. Electronic devices have been seized. Properties searched from Washington state to the DC area. The FBI is staying unusually tight-lipped, which usually means either (a) they don’t know yet, or (b) what they’ve found is too sensitive for public consumption right now.
In the meantime, expect the political fallout to be enormous. Calls to pause certain resettlement programs. Demands for transparency about how many former paramilitary personnel were brought over. And almost certainly a painful reckoning about the gap between humanitarian ideals and homeland security realities.
Because here’s the part that keeps me up at night: if someone with Lakanwal’s background could reach this point without raising red flags earlier, how many others are out there living quiet lives — until they’re not?
The soldiers who serve deserve better than to become statistics in that experiment.
We’ll keep following this story as new information emerges. What seems clear already is that the intersection of intelligence operations, mass migration, and domestic security has created fault lines most policymakers never seriously stress-tested.
And fault lines, eventually, produce earthquakes.
