{"id":11708,"date":"2025-12-08T00:39:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T00:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=11708"},"modified":"2025-12-08T00:39:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T00:39:15","slug":"the-national-guard-shooting-in-washington-dc-why-did-it-happen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=11708","title":{"rendered":"The National Guard shooting in Washington DC: Why did it happen?"},"content":{"rendered":"


By Bill Connor<\/span><\/span>, Op-ed Contributor Friday, December 05, 2025<\/span>National Guard soldiers respond to a shooting near the White House on Nov. 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. According to reports, two National Guardsmen from West Virginia were shot blocks from the White House. The suspect, a 29-year-old Afghan national who came to the U.S. in 2021 under the Biden administration, is being detained at a local hospital. <\/span> | Chip Somodevilla\/Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n

The day before Thanksgiving, Americans were shocked by the tragic shooting of two members of the National Guard by an Afghan asylum seeker allowed into the United States by the Biden Administration. According to the AP:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe suspect in Wednesday\u2019s shooting near the White House that killed Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and critically wounded Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, both of the West Virginia National Guard, is facing charges \u2026 Rahmanullah Lakanwal is a 29-year-old Afghan national who had been living in Bellingham, Washington \u2026 He worked with the CIA during the Afghanistan War.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This killer left his five children in Washington state to drive to DC to ambush Sarah Beckstrom with shots from a .357 pistol, then grabbed Beckstrom\u2019s weapon and mortally wounded her with a shot to the head. He then shot Wolf multiple times, and \u201cWhen Lakanwal paused to reload, a National Guard major leapt from cover and turned the ambush back on the attacker \u2014 stabbing the alleged terrorist in the head multiple times and bringing him to the ground. During the initial attack, the major allegedly heard Lakanwal yelling ‘Allahu Akbar,'” the New York Post reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many wonder how Lakanwal could go from seeming an American ally in Afghanistan to this. I\u2019d like to offer some perspective from what I have learned of Lakanwal and my experiences with Afghans in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

First, we know now that when Lakanwal worked with the CIA as an \u201callied partner,\u201d he was based at FOB Gecko outside Kandahar starting in 2007. Gecko had been Afghan militant leader Mullah Omar\u2019s compound before the U.S. invasion. When I was deployed to Afghanistan from 2007 to 2008 to advise the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), I began my tour near Kandahar with some subordinate forces stationed at Camp Gecko (before I went to take over the advisory mission in nearby Helmand Province). In Afghanistan, the Southern Region, including Kandahar, was the most violent and most infested with the Taliban. This means Lakanwal would have been involved in substantial combat while working with the CIA, and I can attest that things were quite violent there. It also means he would have been a prime recruiting target of the enemy.<\/p>\n

According to former CIA agent and bestselling author Sarah Adams, \u201cISIS channels were the first to praise the (National Guard shooting) largely because Lakanwal\u2019s half-brother had been a recruiter for the Islamic State\u2013Khorasan Province (ISKP).\u201d Additionally, Adams noted: \u201cAfter the fall of Kabul in 2021, Lakanwal\u2019s unit the Kandahar Protection Force and the Khost Protection Force (KPF) became prime targets for both the Haqqani Network and ISKP, which sought either to blackmail or recruit former KPF members.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Part of the blackmail scheme involved threats of killing family members in Afghanistan. Lakanwal may have been vetted for CIA missions in Afghanistan, but clearly wasn\u2019t vetted for resettlement in the U.S. under these circumstances.<\/p>\n

The botched withdrawal is most to blame for what happened in D.C. Former President Biden announced his withdrawal at the worst possible time: the start of the Taliban Spring\/Summer offensive. His State Department compounded the problem by utter incompetence with regard to Special Immigration Visas (SIV). It wasn\u2019t until months after the withdrawal announcement, when the Taliban were overrunning the country, that meaningful efforts at SIV vetting and processing began. The State Department basically lost control: \u201cOne reason for why so many SIVs remain in Afghanistan, the official noted, is \u2018every credential we tried to provide electronically was immediately disseminated to the widest possible pool. And so it was no longer a viable credential to differentiate among populations, and we simply did not have the people for that time to be able to try to sift through that crowd of people demanding access.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

When it was clear the optics of the withdrawal were politically damaging, the Biden administration decided to attempt to find a political silver lining. They directed airlifting of as many Afghans as possible to create the alleged greatest airlift in history. While some American citizens were left behind, tens of thousands of unvetted military-aged males were let loose on America.<\/p>\n

I had a unique experience of being associated with an Afghan Christian interpreter while in Helmand on various missions. Christianity there was extremely rare (he\u2019s the only Afghan Christian I knew about), and this man had to leave Afghanistan due to the threats on his life from being an \u201capostate\u201d from Islam. I remember him telling me of several ANSF who were quite close with us American advisors, talking (in Pashtu among themselves) about how we were infidels and how they would eventually have to fight us as the enemy.<\/p>\n

Lakanwal was likely either recruited by ISKP before he left, blackmailed by threats, or became radicalized against Christian \u201cinfidels\u201d. It is noteworthy that this attack came after Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and five other seditionist congressmen published the video insinuating American military members were, or would be, ordered to commit war crimes. This may have been the final nudge.<\/p>\n

Americans have the right and duty to decide who we allow within our nation. Nationality is about commonalities, including language and religious belief. In our case, the Bible, and as Psalm 33:12 tells us, \u201cBlessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom He has chosen as His heritage.\u201d Pray for our fallen and wounded. May God bless them for protecting the nation they served.<\/p>\n

Bill Connor, a retired Army Infantry colonel, author and Orangeburg attorney, has deployed multiple times to the Middle East. Connor was the senior U.S. military adviser to Afghan forces in Helmand Province, where he received the Bronze Star. A Citadel graduate with a JD from USC, he is also a Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Army War College, earning his master of strategic studies. He is the author of the book Articles from War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bill Connor, Op-ed Contributor Friday, December 05, 2025National Guard soldiers respond to a shooting near the White House on Nov. 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. According to reports, two National Guardsmen from West Virginia were shot blocks from the White House. The suspect, a 29-year-old Afghan national who came to the U.S. in 2021<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[1864,1928,148,2443,2978],"class_list":["post-11708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-christian-living","tag-guard","tag-happen","tag-national","tag-shooting","tag-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}