He came under Operation Allies Welcome. They came from small towns in West Virginia. On the day before Thanksgiving, their lives crossed on a D.C. sidewalk in a way none of them imagined.
By Carlos Taylhardat |
On the day before Thanksgiving, while most of Washington worried about flights, pies, and the first winter storm, Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, buttoned their uniforms and stepped into a different kind of holiday duty.
Their assignment was simple and visible: presence patrol. Walk the blocks around Farragut Square and the White House complex, answer tourists’ questions, be a reassuring splash of camouflage amid office workers and food trucks. It was their first day as deputized Guard officers in the capital, a formal step up after months of routine support work.
Beckstrom had volunteered to stay on through Thanksgiving so others with children could go home to West Virginia. Wolfe, an Air Guard noncommissioned officer from a few towns over, had signed up for the D.C. deployment back in August, part of President Donald Trump’s expanded National Guard presence in cities he said were overwhelmed by crime.
A little after 2:15 p.m. on November 26, at the corner of 17th and I Streets NW, just above the Farragut West Metro entrance, a man in a dark sedan watched them from the curb. Prosecutors say he had driven nearly the entire width of the United States to find a patrol like this one.
His name is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan who once worked alongside U.S. forces in Kandahar and arrived in America under Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden-era program to evacuate at-risk Afghans after the Taliban takeover. Four years later, he was living with his wife and five children in Bellingham, Washington, holding a steady warehouse job, and trying, in outward ways, to be another suburban father in the Pacific Northwest.
According to charging documents, he stepped out of the car with a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver, walked toward the patrol, and opened fire.
What Happened Near the White House
Authorities say the attack was deliberate and methodical. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro described it as a “brazen and targeted” ambush: the gunman first shot one Guardsman, kept firing as that soldier fell, then turned the weapon on the second. Other Guard members nearby returned fire, wounding the suspect and ending the shooting within seconds.
Viewer discretion: The following news clip shows raw footage from immediately after the shooting, including injured soldiers and chaotic scenes. Some viewers may find it disturbing. The clip was recorded in the minutes after the November 26, 2025, shooting near Farragut Square.
Witnesses heard a quick succession of cracks that echoed between glass office towers and the park’s trees, followed by screams and the metallic screech of car horns as traffic froze around Farragut Square. Office workers dropped to the sidewalk. Someone shouted that it was “another active shooter,” the phrase that has become a kind of American siren.
By the time Metropolitan Police officers and Secret Service units sprinted in from the White House perimeter, three people lay on the pavement: Beckstrom and Wolfe, bleeding heavily, and Lakanwal, wounded and disarmed, under the rifles of other guardsmen.
Both soldiers were rushed to MedStar Washington Hospital Center. Beckstrom, a rural West Virginian from Webster County, had been shot in the chest and head. Wolfe, from the Inwood–Martinsburg area, suffered multiple wounds to his torso. Surgeons operated for hours. As of Thursday morning, both remained in critical condition, their families keeping vigil in separate waiting rooms.
At a news conference, Pirro stood at a podium flanked by the soldiers’ portraits on easels. Beside her was Kash Patel, the FBI Director, as agents circulated photos of a bearded man whose journey from Afghan battlefields to a Bellingham cul-de-sac to this D.C. street has become the newest flashpoint in America’s argument over refugees, war, and security.
The full news conference above took place on the morning of November 27, 2025, beginning around 9:15 a.m. Eastern, one day after the shooting near Farragut Square.
Behind the legal language of “assault with intent to kill while armed” and “use of a firearm during a crime of violence,” one fact stood out: the FBI is treating the shooting as an act of terrorism. The Trump administration has immediately ordered 500 more Guard troops to Washington and suspended Afghan immigration processing nationwide pending a review of everyone admitted under Operation Allies Welcome.
At 3 Narratives News, we believe you can’t understand a moment like this without understanding the people inside it. To make sense of this unfortunate and tragic encounter on a D.C. sidewalk, we have to follow Rahmanullah Lakanwal back to the life he led before the gunshots, and the two conflicting stories this country is now learning about him.
From Kandahar to Bellingham: Who Is Rahmanullah Lakanwal?
In the photographs now circulating on cable news, Rahmanullah Lakanwal could be any number of Afghan professionals of his generation: dark hair trimmed short, neat beard, collared shirt, expression halfway between formal seriousness and reluctant smile.
According to U.S. officials and Afghan sources, he spent much of his twenties embedded in the overlapping worlds of U.S. Special Operations forces, CIA-linked Afghan units, and humanitarian work. He grew up in Kabul’s orbit, moved through provinces like Khost and Kandahar, and, by the late 2010s, was working alongside Americans in logistics and field coordination roles.
Human-rights investigators and Afghan analysts say the unit he is believed to have served with was part of the so-called “Zero Units” and the National Directorate of Security’s 01 strike force, which was trained, funded, and tasked by the CIA to hunt Taliban and other insurgents in some of the war’s most violent districts. Those units have been accused in a Human Rights Watch report and other investigations of conducting abusive night raids and extrajudicial killings, allegations that U.S. officials have consistently declined to fully address.
To Americans on the bases those forces helped protect, men like Lakanwal were often seen as crucial allies, fighters and fixers who knew the terrain, spoke the languages, and were willing to risk their lives for the shared mission. To many Afghans whose doors these units kicked in at 2 a.m., they were something closer to ghosts: armed men in night-vision devices, acting with impunity under the cover of counterterrorism. Some Americans now ask whether allies who carried out operations overseas that would be illegal inside the United States, even when those operations were funded by Washington, should later be welcomed as neighbors.
When Kabul fell in August 2021, and Taliban fighters began hunting former government soldiers and intelligence officers, people like Lakanwal went from valuable assets to marked targets overnight. The Biden administration launched Operation Allies Welcome, directing the Department of Homeland Security to lead a crash effort to evacuate and resettle tens of thousands of Afghans who had worked with U.S. forces.
In September 2021, according to U.S. officials, Lakanwal boarded one of those evacuation flights and eventually arrived in the United States under that program. He was processed at a U.S. base, had his biometrics taken, and was paroled into the country as part of a cohort of roughly 70,000–90,000 evacuees.
Resettlement agencies later placed him in Bellingham, Washington, a coastal city near the Canadian border. There, he lived in a modest neighborhood with his wife and five children. Neighbors recall a quiet man who kept to himself, walked his kids to school, and left early for shifts at a distribution center. Local media report he worked for Amazon for a time, without drawing much notice.
By late 2024, as his initial parole period ticked down, he joined thousands of other evacuees in filing for asylum. That application, which would have included detailed biographic information, security checks, and an in-person interview, was approved on April 23, 2025, under the Trump administration. Officials say he had no known criminal record in the United States and no documented criminal convictions in Afghanistan. His years in CIA-linked units were recorded as evidence of having risked his life for the U.S. mission.
What happened between that approval and his decision to drive 2,800 miles across the country with a .357 revolver remains the central unanswered question in this story. Investigators are poring over his digital life, financial records, and contacts to see whether he was acting on instructions from anyone else or driven solely by his own anger and fears.
As they do, two powerful American narratives have already taken shape.
Narrative One: The Vetting Failure Story
In this version of events, Rahmanullah Lakanwal is not a tragic figure or a complicated product of a long war. He is a case study in a broken system.
Critics of Operation Allies Welcome—and of President Biden’s 2021 evacuation more broadly—have spent years warning that the program was rushed, sloppy, and politically motivated. They point to inspector-general reports showing that the Department of Homeland Security and its partners “lacked critical data to properly screen, vet, and inspect” evacuees in the chaotic weeks after Kabul’s fall, and that some Afghans were allowed to travel or enter the United States before all derogatory information had been checked and adjudicated.
Those warnings were already politically potent. Now they have a face.
Within hours of the shooting, President Donald Trump went on camera in the White House briefing room to call the attack “an act of terror carried out by a man this country never should have admitted.” He pledged a sweeping review of every Afghan admitted under Operation Allies Welcome and ordered an immediate, nationwide halt to new Afghan immigration processing. Senior Republicans in Congress revived demands for hearings on “Biden’s Afghan pipeline” and circulated earlier reports showing that dozens of evacuees had, at one point or another, appeared in watch-list databases.
In this narrative, the biography that once made Lakanwal eligible for evacuation—service with CIA-linked units, side-by-side work with U.S. troops—reads differently. It becomes potential camouflage, the perfect résumé for a bad actor who knows how the system thinks and where its blind spots are.
Why, critics ask, was a man who had spent years inside some of the murkiest corners of the Afghan war paroled into the United States before every scrap of tactical data about his unit had been checked? Why did no agency appear to track his status as he moved from temporary parolee to asylee to armed interstate traveler?
They also look at the aftermath. To them, the fact that the FBI is investigating the shooting as terrorism, that the alleged gunman drove cross-country and appeared to wait for the right moment to ambush uniformed soldiers, only underlines the point: this wasn’t random street crime; this was a national security failure.
When Trump sends more National Guard troops into Washington and other cities, and when his DHS suspends Afghan processing entirely, supporters of this narrative see decisive action that matches the threat. To them, the image that sticks is not only of two young West Virginians in hospital beds, but of a line that was crossed when one man’s refugee story ended with him raising a gun against the flag he once fought beside.
The question they leave hanging is blunt: If even one Rahmanullah slipped through, how many more are out there?
Narrative Two: The Abandoned Ally Story
There is another way to read the same set of facts, and it begins with the way the United States used and then left its Afghan partners.
In this narrative, Rahmanullah Lakanwal is first and foremost one of the tens of thousands of Afghans who risked their lives alongside U.S. forces. He joined U.S.-backed units in his teens or early twenties, ran missions in Kandahar and other dangerous provinces, and lived for years with the knowledge that the Taliban had a long memory for men like him.
Human-rights investigators and Afghan analysts say the unit he is believed to have served with was part of the so-called ‘Zero Units’, specifically NDS-03, the Kandahar Strike Force, which was trained, funded, and tasked by the CIA to hunt Taliban and other insurgents in some of the war’s most violent districts.
When the U.S. military left, the argument goes, the country owed people like Lakanwal more than a place on a flight. Operation Allies Welcome was, at its best, an attempt to honor that debt: resettlement, a path to legal status, a chance to build a new life in a place where the enemies who wanted him dead could not reach him.
But the journey from “asset” to “neighbor” is harder than it looks on a PowerPoint slide. Once the planes landed and the cameras moved on, Afghans like Lakanwal found themselves in small American cities trying to support large families on warehouse wages, navigate a foreign bureaucracy in a language they were still learning, and process years of trauma with little access to culturally appropriate mental-health care.
Advocacy groups such as #AfghanEvac and veterans who fought alongside Afghan partners note that the same government now pointing to Lakanwal as proof of a failed program relied on people like him for two decades. They also stress that the overwhelming majority of Afghans evacuated under Operation Allies Welcome have done exactly what was asked of them: found work, enrolled their children in school, paid taxes, and tried to disappear into the quiet anonymity of American life.
From this perspective, what happened in Washington is not a referendum on all Afghan evacuees but a warning about what happens when you weaponize human beings for years and then give them too little support in the world you drop them into.
The fact that U.S. immigration authorities responded to the shooting by suspending all Afghan processing, cutting off what many Afghans in Pakistan and elsewhere saw as their last legal path to safety, stands as a second betrayal. One man’s alleged crime becomes a justification to shut the door on thousands of families still in danger because they did what the U.S. asked them to do.
This narrative does not excuse what happened at 17th and I. It does not ask the families of Beckstrom or Wolfe to feel anything but grief and anger. Instead, it asks a different question: What responsibility does the United States bear for the lives and minds of the people it trained, armed, and told to stand by its side?
In that sense, the D.C. shooting is not just about vetting; it is about unfinished wars. It echoes debates we explored in earlier coverage of foreign entanglements and blowback, like “Trump, China and Venezuela: Four Reasons This Standoff Matters”, and it will almost certainly shape how future conflicts think about promises to local partners.
The Silent Story: Three Futures Colliding on One Sidewalk
Strip away the political talking points, and what remains from that November afternoon are three young lives, two in uniform, one in handcuffs and hospital restraints, whose paths were shaped by decisions far above their heads.
Sarah Beckstrom grew up in Webster County, West Virginia, in the hills east of Charleston. Friends describe a quiet, stubborn teenager who gravitated to the National Guard at 18, in part for the structure and in part for the chance to see a world beyond her county line. Her commanders say she volunteered to stay on duty in Washington over Thanksgiving so soldiers with kids could be with their families.
Andrew Wolfe joined the Air National Guard in 2019. He came from the panhandle, from the I-81 corridor of chain restaurants, youth sports fields, and commuter traffic that ties West Virginia to the D.C. metro area. At the 167th Airlift Wing, he worked in force support, managing people, paperwork, and training pipelines. Friends talk about cornhole tournaments, late-night drives, and a pride in uniform that was earnest rather than performative.
Neither Beckstrom nor Wolfe planned to be in a firefight two blocks from the White House. Their mission, as explained to them, was to provide visible support to a capital where the President said crime and disorder were out of control. They expected bored shifts, not emergency surgery.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal spent his twenties in very different uniformed worlds: the fatigues of Afghan army and intelligence units, the soft-skinned SUVs of CIA-linked strike forces, the branded vests of humanitarian organizations. He has lived through the full arc of America’s longest war, from its optimistic middle years to the brutal night raids and drone strikes to the panicked evacuation and its hurried efforts to keep promises.
In Bellingham, neighbors saw a man trying to start over. His children walked to the local schools. He worked long shifts in warehouses, grabbed coffee in the same strip-mall plazas as everyone else, and occasionally appeared at community events organized for newly arrived Afghans. Underneath, according to people who knew him, he carried the weight of relatives still in danger and the knowledge that the war that defined him had ended with an uneasy exile.
On November 26, those three futures—a young woman from rural West Virginia, a small-town airman, and an Afghan evacuee—met on a corner of 17th Street. Two ended the day in operating rooms. One ended it under guard, facing the possibility of a life sentence or worse.
The silent story here is not only about a refugee who might, or might not, have been properly vetted. It is about how American policy turned all three into characters in the same unfinished narrative of war and security.
It is about how a decision in Kabul to stand with the Americans led, years later, to a decision in Washington to suspend Afghan immigration for thousands of others who did the same. It is about how a crime-fighting deployment meant to make the capital feel safer left two families in West Virginia waiting by hospital beds hundreds of miles from home.
We do not yet know why, in that moment, the alleged gunman chose to attack these two soldiers. We do not know what he hoped to achieve, or whether he had any plan for what would come after.
We do know that, as with so many stories we cover at 3 Narratives News, this one lives in the space between the slogans. It sits between “failed vetting” and “abandoned ally,” between the war we fought abroad and the fears we live with at home.
There are no easy answers at the end of this sidewalk. Only questions that will follow all three families for years: How did it come to this? Could it have been prevented? And what, if anything, will change before the next collision between the lives we armed abroad and the lives we send to patrol our own streets?
Key Takeaways
- The D.C. shooting is the collision of three biographies—an Afghan ally, a young Army specialist, and a young Air Guard sergeant—all shaped in different ways by America’s long war and its domestic politics.
- Operation Allies Welcome was designed to honor a promise to Afghans who worked with U.S. forces, but early watchdog reports flagged gaps in data and vetting that critics now point to as the root of this case.
- Republican leaders and the Trump administration frame the attack as proof of a vetting failure, using it to justify a halt to Afghan immigration processing and a wider immigration crackdown.
- Advocates for Afghan evacuees and some U.S. veterans see the suspect as one of many abandoned allies—men and women asked to fight in America’s wars and then left to navigate trauma and bureaucracy largely alone.
- The FBI is investigating the shooting as terrorism, but the suspect’s exact motive remains unknown, leaving open questions about ideology, mental health, and personal grievance.
- The silent story is about systems, not only individuals: how policy decisions about war, resettlement, policing, and fear bring people who never should have met into each other’s line of fire.
Questions This Article Answers
Who are the two National Guard members wounded near the White House?
The victims are Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of the 863rd Military Police Company, West Virginia Army National Guard, and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, of the 167th Airlift Wing, West Virginia Air National Guard. Both were on their first day of formal deputized patrol duty in Washington, D.C., when they were ambushed near Farragut Square and remain in critical condition.
Who is Rahmanullah Lakanwal and how did he come to the United States?
Rahmanullah Lakanwal is a 29-year-old Afghan national who previously worked with U.S.-backed forces and CIA-linked units in Afghanistan. He arrived in the United States in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden administration’s program for at-risk Afghans, and later settled in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and five children. In April 2025, he was granted asylum after additional vetting, giving him legal status and work authorization.
What exactly happened during the shooting in Washington, D.C.?
According to investigators and court filings, Lakanwal drove from Washington state to Washington, D.C., and on November 26 approached a National Guard patrol near 17th and I Streets NW. Armed with a .357 revolver, he allegedly shot Beckstrom and Wolfe multiple times in an ambush-style attack before other Guardsmen returned fire and wounded him. The FBI is treating the incident as an act of terrorism, and federal prosecutors have charged him with assault with intent to kill and firearms offenses, with additional charges possible if either victim dies.
What is Operation Allies Welcome and why is it being debated now?
Operation Allies Welcome is a U.S. government initiative launched in 2021 to resettle vulnerable Afghans—particularly those who worked alongside U.S. forces, diplomats, and humanitarian efforts—after the Taliban returned to power. Supporters see it as a moral obligation to former allies. Critics, citing inspector-general reports and congressional oversight, argue that the program’s rushed roll-out left gaps in screening and vetting. The suspected involvement of an OAW evacuee in the D.C. attack has intensified this debate and prompted a temporary suspension of Afghan immigration processing.
How are politicians and officials responding to the shooting?
President Trump has denounced the shooting as an act of terror and ordered additional National Guard deployments to the capital, while calling for a comprehensive review of all Afghans admitted under Operation Allies Welcome. Republican lawmakers are using the case to renew scrutiny of the Biden administration’s evacuation and vetting decisions. At the same time, human-rights groups and Afghan-evacuee advocates warn against collective punishment, arguing that suspending Afghan immigration over one case puts thousands of at-risk families in greater danger.
What deeper questions does this case raise beyond vetting and terrorism?
Beyond immediate security concerns, the case raises longer-term questions about how the United States treats those who fought alongside its forces, how it supports them once they arrive on American soil, and how domestic deployments of the National Guard intersect with the legacies of foreign wars. It invites readers to consider not just whether one man should have been admitted, but how three young people, each shaped by the same conflict in different ways, came to meet in the line of fire on a quiet city street.
For more on how technology and media shape stories like this one, see our analysis “AI in the Newsroom: Truth, Lies, and What Readers Should Know.”
