I want to dive into the rabbit hole of these secretive CIA-led kill squads known as “Zero Units” in Afghanistan. I was in the Army from 2009 to 2016, very immersed in military news and culture and never heard of these guys. I knew Special Forces ran Afghan commando teams, but these “Zero Units” seem to be a step beyond that. Run and lead by the CIA- these teams are assassination squads, full stop. News reports use military jargon to soften their purpose, but these elite teams of Afghan troops organized, funded, and lead by the CIA were purpose built to assassinate targets and frequently killed innocents.
The man who shot two National Guard troops in Washington D.C. was confirmed by the NYT to have been part of a secretive CIA-led kill squad known as “Zero Units” in Afghanistan. See my full article with sources cited on SubStack:
The Afghan refugee accused of shooting two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., fought in the late days of the U.S. war there as part of a “Zero Unit,” a paramilitary force that worked with the C.I.A., according to a person briefed on the investigation and an Afghan intelligence officer familiar with the matter. The units were known for their brutality and labeled “death squads” by human rights groups. - NYT
There’s going to be so much conspiracy surrounding this case. I want to stick to the known facts and the blatantly obvious conclusions. According to Rolling Stone magazine about 10,000 members of the Afghan Zero Units were relocated to the United States during the disastrous US evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021. MAGA will blame Biden for bringing these folks in and the left will blame Trump for giving the shooter asylum in April of 2025 and for setting the date for the 2021 withdrawal. Who cares.
We collectively as a nation hold responsibility for what happened in our twenty year military occupation of Afghanistan. This shooting in D.C. is part of the chaos of that war, the blow-back of spending twenty years and trillions of dollars bombing a country into oblivion. Twenty years of night raids where troops would kill every military aged man on their target. Twenty years of military patrols and checkpoints, twenty years propping up corrupt officials and warlords.
In the final days of the war in 2021, roughly 81,000 Afghan immigrants — including almost 10,000 members of the Zero Units, along with many of their families — were evacuated by the CIA and resettled across the U.S., according to reports. Many were promised Special Immigrant Visas for their service — visas meant for Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked directly for the U.S. government. There are close to 4,500 living in the U.S. who are still waiting to secure legal status because of paperwork delays from the federal government. -Rolling Stones
Watch: Seth Harp talks about the US policy to kill every “military aged man” on targets in their assassination program in Afghanistan.
You have to read Seth Harp’s book(The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces) to get a more broad understanding of the US assassination program that evolved during the GWOT. Understanding the context of the JSOC assassination program gives you insight into the mission of these CIA “Zero Unit” teams. The amount of death, killing, combat, and trauma these Zero Unit Afghan members must have seen is unimaginable.
JSOC units who participated in “night raids”, the euphemism for the US assassination program, would be in country for six month stints where they would conduct hundreds of missions. Then the troops would be rotated state side. Over the course of a decade a very experienced operator might spend 4 or 5 total years in a combat zone and have killed dozens of people.
Today, standing in his apartment in San Antonio, it is impossible not to notice Andar’s service etched into his flesh. His right arm and torso bear jagged scars shaped like crescent moons caused by a burst from an AK-47 rifle. His stomach and chest are a patchwork of pink and white shrapnel scars from the suicide bomber. His arms and legs tell the same brutal tale. - Rolling Stones
The Afghani members of these squads never got rotated out of country. Nasir Andar joined the paramilitary unit at 18 and fought for the CIA for 15 years. Constantly going on night raids. Constantly seeing combat, killing people, and watching friends die.
Zero Units were like a scalpel pursuing terrorist targets at the highest level. They mainly operated at night. Their war was a series of high-stakes raids against targets making car and suicide bombs, and terrorist leaders with bodyguards. When the Zero Units went out, they had a better chance than their counterparts to get into a fight, which left them wounded or killed.
“We were fighting for freedom,” Andar tells me. “We were fighting for our land. For our flag. For our dignity. We were fighting for our rights and for humanity. We didn’t want our soil to be used to hurt anyone else. We wanted Afghanistan to stand on the same level as other countries — to be respected, to be trusted. We wanted Afghans to walk through the world with the same kind of pride and recognition as everyone else.” - Rolling Stones
It shouldn’t surprise any of us that the CIA backed paramilitary Zero Force members have been implicated in war-crimes. CIA backed militias have been known to commit atrocities throughout history. The CIA backed coup in Guatemala of 1954 lead to 200,000 killed and 40,000 people disappeared. In the last century the CIA funded and backed paramilitaries and coup attempts in Cuba, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, El Salvador, Grenada, Panama, and Venezuela. And that’s just in Latin America.
The entire purpose of a CIA-led paramilitary is to create a layer of separation and deniability in order to protect the US government from backlash against the atrocities committed at their behest. To create a force that can do things official US government forces cannot.
NADER SHAH KOT, Afghanistan — Razo Khan woke up suddenly to the sight of assault rifles pointed at his face, and demands that he get out of bed and onto the floor.
Within minutes, the armed raiders had separated the men from the women and children. Then the shooting started.
As Mr. Khan was driven away for questioning, he watched his home go up in flames. Within were the bodies of two of his brothers and of his sister-in-law Khanzari, who was shot three times in the head. Villagers who rushed to the home found the burned body of her 3-year-old daughter, Marina, in a corner of a torched bedroom.
The men who raided the family’s home that March night, in the district of Nader Shah Kot, were members of an Afghan strike force trained and overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency in a parallel mission to the United States military’s, but with looser rules of engagement.
Ostensibly, the force was searching for militants. But Mr. Khan and his family had done nothing to put themselves in the cross hairs of the C.I.A.-sponsored strike force, according to investigators.
It was clear that the raiding force had “committed an atrocity,” said Jan-mir Zazai, a member of the Khost provincial council who was part of the government investigating team. “Everyone we spoke to said they would swear on the innocence of the victims.” - NYT
One of the most gruesome episodes examined by The Times was in Khogyani District, in Nangarhar Province. The forces handcuffed and hooded two brothers and, after a brief interrogation as their wives and children watched, both men were dragged away and executed in a corner of a bedroom that was then detonated over their heads, according to relatives and villagers who pulled the bodies out of the rubble.
In a period of a little over a year, human rights officials registered at least 15 complaints of torture by the strike force based in Nangarhar Province, which has roughly 1,000 fighters and is known as “02.”
At a September news conference in the city of Jalalabad, elders from three districts of Nangarhar said that over 100 civilians were killed by the 02 unit the month before. (That number could not be verified independently.)
One of Mr. Taher’s grandsons, Sekandar, 16, was visiting from Jalalabad during a school break. He was sleeping in the yard and was awakened by gunshots, he said, spotting the light from the raiders’ laser sights racing around. Sekandar said the forces spoke both Pashto and English.
The strike force had climbed ladders and was on the walls of the house, ordering Mr. Taher’s family to come out. But Sekandar said that when they followed the order to come out with their hands up, one of Mr. Taher’s sons, Naeem Shah, was shot in his left hand. Then a grandson, Shaker Khan, was shot in the head.
Another of Mr. Taher’s sons, Mohammed Raheem, had also been gunned down. The remaining men were handcuffed, and the women and children were put in one room. - NYT
It’s clear from the reporting that extrajudicial executions was standard operating procedure for these Zero Force units.
Mahzala watched as the gunmen questioned Safiullah, 28, and 20-year-old Sabir, before roughly pinning them against a courtyard wall. Then, ignoring their frantic protests of innocence, the masked men put guns to the back of her sons’ heads. One shot. Two. Then a third. Her youngest, “the quiet, gentle one,” was still alive after the first bullet, Mahzala told me, so they shot him again.
Mahzala’s neighbors had pressed me to meet her; I was a foreigner, I must be able to help. Three months had passed since the raid. The neighbors believed it was the work of the feared Zero Units — squadrons of U.S.-trained Afghan special forces soldiers.
My reporting showed that even the raids that did end in the capture or killing of known militants frequently also involved civilian casualties. Far too often, I found the Zero Unit soldiers acted on flawed intelligence and mowed down men, women and children, some as young as 2, who had no discernible connection to terrorist groups.
And the U.S. responsibility for the Zero Unit operations is quietly muddied because of a legal carve-out that allows the CIA — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for the operations — to act without the same oversight as the American military.
“My back was to the house and I don’t know how long I was sitting there,” he said quietly, but that’s when he heard the sound of firing. “It was just like pop-pops, so it was silenced guns.” Batour heard the helicopters take off. “Immediately my father ran to the house screaming, but I couldn’t hear him. I ran after him. My father said: ‘Come on. They are finished.’”
They found his two brothers dead. They’d been shot many times.
That night, 11 people were killed including Batour’s brothers: Sehatullah, 28, a teacher at a secondary school in Khogyani district, left behind a wife and three young sons, and Khalid Hemat, 26, who went to university with Batour, had married just four months earlier. - ProPublica
These stories just go on, and on. I have to stop quoting them here otherwise this article would never end. And you have to remember these are only the stories that made it out to western media. We’ll never know the true extent of the atrocities committed by these Zero Force units on behalf, and with the full backing of the CIA, but it’s clear that it’s a systemic issue. The extrajudicial executions of innocents was the feature, not the bug. These Zero Force units existed to kill targets on behalf of the US government so that our official forces and politicians escaped liability.
Bringing it Full Circle
To bring it full circle ICE is being run in the same way as these Zero Force units. ICE is anonymous and not accountable for their crimes. We’ve already witnessed first hand how these goons have escalated their tactics due to their lack of accountability. Multiple citizens have now been shot by ICE. They routinely lie to the courts and charge citizens with made up charges. Their end game is extrajudicial killings and disappearances for dissidents. That’s where authoritarian regimes always go. Miller, trump, Vought, Karp, and other psychopaths in power would love to be able to torture, disappear, and assassinate their political opponents.
ICE operates with the same lack of due process. Every brown person is assumed to be an illegal immigrant. They detain them first and figure out their legal status later. Just the same as the Zero Force troops assumed every military-aged male was an enemy combat and executed them as standard operating procedure. How long will it be before ICE executes “suspected narco-terrorist illegals” during their raids? Our government killed thousands of people each month in this manner in Afghanistan. We’ve killed 83 people already in the Caribbean with boat strikes this year merely on the accusation of being a drug-trafficker.
Inevitable Consequences
The shooting in D.C. was an inevitable consequence of how we conducted the war in Afghanistan. We used these Afghans for our own ends and then just dropped them. Many of the recruits were teenagers when they first joined the Zero Forces. These Afghan soldiers saw more brutal combat than any of the US government forces, yet they don’t qualify for VA benefits or healthcare. They don’t qualify for disability. They fought on behalf of the US and committed atrocities on behalf of the US but now they’re left to fend for themselves.
Of course these men who have suffered so much trauma are going to snap when that their legal status runs out. Of course they’re going to snap when they see other Afghani nationals being deported, like Mohammad Ali Dadfar, who worked for the US as a translator and had settled in Colorado and gotten his CDL. Mohammad was picked up by ICE in October. These men know that being sent back to Afghanistan is a death sentence.
We don’t get to act surprised when these CIA trained, CIA paid, and CIA lead assassins decide to turn their skills against the same government who invaded their country, who bombed their relatives, the same government who used them to fight their countrymen, and then failed to deliver on the promises made in order to secure their service.
On April 23rd, 2025 Jamal Wali, another Afghan interpreter who had been relocated to the US was killed by police in a traffic stop. On April 27th, 2025 Abdul Rahman Waziri who had worked with US Special Forces in Afghanistan was shot and killed after a dispute over a parking space.
Warning, the following video is graphic it shows Jamal Wali’s traffic stop and fatal shooting.
Listen to Wali’s words in the beginning. His frustration at having served the US and then being dumped in the US. He felt like he was stuck in the US without a way to survive and couldn’t go back to Afghanistan because we’d ruined the country, and he’d be in danger due to working with US forces.
I can understand how that stress would drive anyone to violence. Especially men who have spent years in combat. There are over 10,000 members of the CIA Zero Force in the United States right now. 10,000 members of a force that performed routine extrajudicial executions. 10,000 members of a force whose standard operating procedure was to kill every military aged male on a target.
We have 10,000 Afghan paramilitary members who are now seeing their legal status expire under the Trump regime. Who are seeing fellow Afghan servicemembers being detained by ICE. 10,000 combat hardened veterans who the US government promised to take care of, who are now left to fend for themselves in a country hostile to immigrants.
The bulk of the help for the Afghan refugees is coming from non-profit groups funded by US veterans of the war in Afghanistan.
Andar and the other Zero Unit soldiers arrived in America with only their clothes and whatever they could carry on the plane. “Blackbird,” he said — her nickname while in Afghanistan. “I helped support one of your ops.”
They stepped out of the tent, and Andar confessed many of the soldiers were coming to him for help. They exchanged numbers. A few weeks later, Bakshi’s phone rang. It was Andar. Three families were in a suburban Maryland hotel with no food. The children were going hungry. Bakshi went to the supermarket and delivered a few days’ worth of groceries.
After that, Bakshi and Andar started talking regularly as they solved problems for the veterans. They tackled everything from providing food to hungry families to helping with green-card applications to facilitating prosthetics for amputees. Bakshi founded the nonprofit FAMIL to pay the Zero Unit veterans back for protecting her in Afghanistan.
“It’s not about the war anymore,” he says. “It’s about what we promised those guys we’d do. We said we’d take care of them. And now we’re the ones waiting for someone to keep their promise.”
“We lost everything,” he tells me. “We lost our country. We lost our flag. We lost our family, we lost our brothers, and we lost our dignity.” - Rolling Stones
This NBC article from 2023 highlights the crisis for these Afghan soldiers.
About 10,000 to 12,000 members of the Afghan National Strike Unit, a clandestine force known as the “Zero Units,” were evacuated from Afghanistan when the U.S. military withdrew from the country in August 2021. But their two-year work permits in the U.S. are due to expire within days or weeks, and the veterans worry they will no longer be able to support their families — and some worry the work they did for the CIA may even be harming their chances of getting green cards.
A former Afghan commander with the strike force, Gen. Mohammad Shah, wrote a letter warning lawmakers last month that his former troops are in “urgent crisis” and pleading for action to resolve their status.
“Without your help, we are trapped,” Shah wrote in the letter, which was obtained by NBC News.
“Recently, there have been cases of suicide within our community driven by the overwhelming sentiment of helplessness we feel as our requests for immigration assistance go ignored by the U.S. Government,” Shah wrote. - NBC
Violent Deaths of Despair
Violent deaths of despair in a country with such easy access to firearms is inevitable. What’s the difference between the D.C. National Guard shooter and the Marine who shot up the Mormon church in Michigan? Or the former Marine Sniper and Iraq war vet who shot eight people at a waterfront bar in North Carolina?
Those Marines had access to VA medical care, disability pensions, were legally allowed to work, and weren’t under threat of being deported to a country where they’d almost certainly face execution. Think of how much more stress these Afghan refugees are under. These Afghan Zero Force members saw way more combat and thus trauma than the Michigan or North Carolina shooter. Their work permits expired in 2023. They now face the threat of ICE detention. Trump announced that the US is permanently pausing all immigration from Afghanistan and other “third-world countries” last night.
Should we deport every combat veteran in this country because clearly they’re more inclined to violent outbursts? Should we have banned our soldiers from returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan because they’d be more apt to commit violence at home? It’s obvious that what our soldiers need is support and care, so why is it not so obvious for the Afghan allies we’ve brought over? Why is the rhetoric online immediately to deport them all? We destroyed their country! We asked them to help us. We are responsible for them as much as we are responsible for every traumatize US combat veteran.
It doesn’t surprise me when people pushed to the edge lash out. What surprises me actually is that we haven’t seen more violence from veterans who have no hope for a better future.
In at least one instance, however, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services used a Human Rights Watch report decrying the units as a reason to deny asylum to an Afghan soldier who had worked alongside the U.S. forces during the war. - NYT
The answer isn’t to deport these Afghans back to face execution. The answer is to not destabilize foreign nations. Not run CIA backed assassination squads. The answer is to not dump these Afghans who fought alongside the US here without the resources and help to survive. The answer isn’t to strip them of their legal status. The amount of money ICE is spending on detention and deportation could just be used to help these families survive.
Maybe the D.C. shooter wouldn’t have driven across the country to kill those National Guard troops if he’d just been provided a pension that he could use to feed his wife and five young children.
But that’s fascism folks, the billionaire class has decided that they’d rather build a paramilitary police force to shoot the starving masses in the streets, because it’s more profitable for the elites to kill them than to feed them. So we’re just going to see more of this stochastic violence as more people are pushed to the edge and lose their means to survive.
11/29/2025 Update, from CBS:
According to a former Afghan commando who spoke with CBS News on Thursday, Lakanwal led a unit of Afghan special forces in the south of the country and worked closely with the international troops.
The former commando told CBS News that Lakanwal was left deeply troubled by the death of a close friend and fellow Afghan commander in 2024, whom he said had unsuccessfully sought asylum in the U.S.
Multiple law enforcement sources told CBS News on Thursday that a running theory of investigators is that the suspect suffered from paranoia and other mental health challenges that indicated he believed authorities sought to deport him from the U.S. Counterterrorism officials said that ISIS and al-Qaeda-aligned narratives often target former U.S. partner forces with messaging that they will be abandoned or deported. While the suspect repeatedly expressed a fear of deportation, investigators have not linked that anxiety to extremist propaganda or a specific organization, officials said. Investigators are searching for evidence of extremist influence. -CBS
Thanks for this article. I'm reading the Fort Bragg Cartel, and these men coming home are so traumatized and changed, that they kill their wives. It's time for the US to re-evaluate our policies when we get our country back from the Fascists.
I do not believe that you had touched on this pertinent bit in your article, but the stated justification of the National Guard deployment to DC was “crime” despite evidence indicating that crime has been on the decline in DC.
Given the lack of justification for this deployment and the documented authoritarian tendencies of this regime, it is highly probable that the deployment is a result of a strategic tolerance for risk seeking an unassailable justification for power consolidation.
They want a Reichstag Fire moment and are willing to ignite it themselves.