The story we are being sold about the murder of Sarah Beckstrom and the wounding of Andrew Wolfe is that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the National Guard killer, was radicalized in the US. That isn’t the first time we have heard that excuse, and it’s suspect. There might be another explanation that goes back to Afghanistan. What if his work for the CIA is the reason? A report on Drop Site News at Substack suggests that as a trained CIA killer, Lakanwal was involved in atrocities.
This story from Drop Site could be pure propaganda. I don’t know.
We know that Rahmanullah was a CIA asset in one of the most feared and potentially out of control units in Kandahar, the Zero Unit. “The individual—and so many others—should have NEVER been allowed to come here,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe told Fox.
An article at Drop Site News by Emran Feroz and Abdul Rahman Lakanwal, who is not a relative of Rahmanullah Lakanwal but comes from the same district, claims Rahmanallah was imprisoned for a short while in Afghanistan with other CIA assets, fellow Afghans in the unit. He was imprisoned after the zero unit killed Afghan police forces in Kandalhar that they were supposed to be defending.
They weren’t held long because the police had no authority. That report allegedly comes from five sources. I have no way to confirm it, and can’t say if it is true or not.
The sources said the zero unit operatives were notorious criminals who committed war crimes.
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.”
There is more at Drop Site, and it does raise questions about Rahmanallah’s ties to the zero unit. Was the shooting some bizarre form of atonement or revenge for what he had done?
It’s a tribal society. Entirely different from the United States.