For years before he allegedly traveled across the country and shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal struggled with severe mental health issues. He would sometimes isolate himself for weeks on end or experience “manic” episodes during which he would embark on lengthy drives in the family car, according to emails sent by a community advocate working to help him and his family. The advocate suggested that Lakanwal suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder related to his time fighting the Taliban with the U.S. military, and dealt with challenges adjusting to his new life in Washington state.
“Rahmanullah was a man who was extremely proud and capable in the world he came from, who felt defeated in the world he came to,” the advocate, who volunteered supporting Afghan families in the state, told CBS News.
Lakanwal is among tens of thousands of Afghans who have resettled in the U.S. after aiding the American military in Afghanistan. His struggle with assimilation and his mental health, as described in the emails the advocate shared in the wake of his arrest, is familiar to others who belong to or work within that community. Many such Afghan refugees have confronted an uphill battle in adapting to life in the U.S., feeling estranged from their home country and as though they don’t have the support or tools necessary to thrive in their new one, experts and Afghan veterans now living in the U.S. tell TIME.
“They’re starved for resources,” says Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac, an organization that supports and advocates for Afghan nationals who came to the U.S. after assisting the country’s military. “Afghans just feel totally left behind, totally betrayed and totally unwanted.”
Seven months before Lakanwal was identified as the suspected gunman in the shooting in D.C., another Afghan national who worked with American troops in his home country died in a shootout with police in Fairfax, Virginia.
During what started as a routine traffic stop, the man, Jamal Wali, detailed his struggles living in the U.S.
“I can’t even go back to my f**** country because of you f****** people … I lost everything. I have nothing,” Wali said in body-cam footage of the incident.
He told the officer who pulled him over that he had four children, that he couldn’t find a job or receive disability benefits, and that his license was taken because he couldn’t pay insurance. He called the U.S. racist, before proclaiming that he should have served the Taliban instead. Shortly after that comment, Wali reached for his gun and fired shots that investigators say wounded two officers. A third officer then returned fire from the passenger side of Wali’s vehicle, according to authorities, killing him.
The experts and other veterans who spoke to TIME all stressed that Afghan nationals living in the U.S. should not be defined by singular acts of violence, and that the struggles Lakanwal and Wali are described to have experienced are not universal among the community. But while the two cases—separated by just a handful of months and miles—are outliers within the country’s broader Afghan veteran population, for many they underscore the challenges such refugees face, and signal the need for further support.
The challenging road to assimilation
Thousands of Afghans worked closely with the U.S. military during the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan as interpreters, cultural advisers, drivers, and members of special operations forces. Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, many have resettled in the U.S., including through the Biden Administration program that Lakanwal arrived under, Operation Allies Welcome, and its successor, Operation Enduring Welcome.
Operation Allies Welcome allowed Afghans to enter the U.S. on parole for two years without permanent immigration status as part of an effort by the Biden Administration to protect vulnerable Afghans—particularly those who collaborated with the American military—following the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. After about a year, the program shifted to the longer-term Operation Enduring Welcome, which continued the resettlement efforts. All told, nearly 200,000 Afghans resettled in the U.S. under the two programs.
Read more: Zero Unit: What We Know About the Elite CIA Force Allegedly Tied to the D.C. Shooting Suspect
The process of resettlement and assimilation has presented a flurry of challenges for Afghan nationals who have come to the country, ranging from the practical, like finding work, to the more nuanced, like forging a new identity as an Afghan-American without the support of friends and family. And as they build up, these challenges often take a toll on refugees’ mental health.
When Nadeem Yousify first arrived in California from Afghanistan, he had no job, friends, or family. He was able to find mental health counseling, but says the services were thin, and that he felt they were ultimately there to make sure he wouldn’t harm himself or others, rather than provide thoughtful counseling as he navigated new challenges. Without a support system, he says, it was difficult to set up his life.
“We’re looking at mental health, but we don’t look at, where does it start? Where does it come from? How that somebody goes from zero to 100?” Yousify, an Afghan national who worked as a translator and interpreter in Afghanistan alongside American troops before coming to the U.S. on a Special Immigrant Visa in 2015, tells TIME in a conversation about Lakanwal.
“You don’t have that much time to look for resources. And also, there is not that much resources,” he says. “Everything piles up and it creates more and more and more and more problems. We have to look at the stressors … And especially for people who are from Afghanistan. So the financial stressors is one of them; language barrier stressors; cultural stressors; the being away from the family and loved ones stressors; the situation back home stressors.”
Yousify says many Afghan veterans are unable to bring their loved ones to the U.S., and that it has been especially hard to do so during the current Administration. President Donald Trump has significantly restricted legal immigration pathways since returning to office in January, including by suspending refugee admissions shortly after beginning his second term and barring nationals from Afghanistan and 11 other countries from entering the U.S. in June.
Yousify also notes that seeking help, whether from friends or through mental health resources, is frowned upon in Afghanistan, which he says leaves many veterans isolated.
“Afghan culture itself is very, very masculine culture,” he says. “So the problem with the Afghans that I have seen a lot of people, it’s like they are hard to open up. They are hard to talk about their issues. They’re hard to ask for help. They hesitate.”
Shahpur Pazhman, a Black Hawk pilot who aided the American military in Afghanistan and later came to the U.S. with his wife and children in 2021 after the Afghan capital of Kabul fell to the Taliban, tells TIME that “we were feeling very hopeless” upon moving to the country. He wanted to continue his work as a pilot in the U.S., but ended up working as an Uber Eats and Lyft driver, a transition that made him “mentally uncomfortable.”
He says his family members fell into depression due to the stress of finding basic necessities and thinking about the future, and sought counseling. Eventually, Pazhman found work as a flight line technician in an airport—a post he enjoys—through an aid organization called Upwardly Global, and he now lives in Arizona with his family.
“It was hard for me to leave my country,” he says. “But I love America.”
A dearth of mental health resources
While both the federal government and nonprofit organizations offer services aimed at helping Afghan nationals who are resettling in the U.S., people who work to provide such support in the community tell TIME the available resources may not always address the particular circumstances and needs of Afghan veterans who struggle with their mental health as they confront challenges trying to assimilate.
“Oftentimes, these individuals were evacuated here, alone, without any support networks, no family, and being resettled in the middle sometimes of nowhere, and having to navigate a very different world, a very different tempo, while not getting those mental health resources that they desperately needed,” Shala Gafary, an attorney at Human Rights First who has worked with thousands of Afghans—many of whom are veterans—to help them obtain visas and navigate resettlement services.
“There were resources available for mental health for Afghans that were set up by the federal government,” she acknowledges, but adds, “I just don’t think that they were designed with the veteran in mind.”
VanDiver, the president of #AfghanEvac, tells TIME that as well as believing that mental health resources are not catered to their specific assimilation experiences, many in the community feel that there aren’t enough resources for them more broadly.
“They don’t understand why everything takes so long to get basic needs … They weren’t told that they were not going to have access to the mental health support that they need,” VanDiver says.
Stacey Barnes, an executive director for Alight, a global humanitarian organization that provides social support and resettlement services to thousands of Afghans in the Minnesota area, tells TIME that many Afghan veterans she has worked with struggle with a sense of self, which she says adds more weight to the task of assimilating and often impacts their mental health.
“There is a very deep loss of identity that people experience when they go through displacement,” she says. “And this is a profound loss: your ability to speak your language, your ability to eat the food that you know and is comforting to you, the ability to walk down a street that is familiar.”
She says that the loss of rank, when Afghan soldiers go from a place of reverence and authority within the military in Afghanistan to working low-paying jobs or having no job at all in the U.S., makes the assimilation process even more difficult, and takes a toll on the mental health of veterans.
Her organization has found that community building is effective in helping the Afghan refugees it works with. Through events like Afghan sewing socials, members have been able to bond over their shared backgrounds, according to Barnes. Other events seek to build connections regardless of nationality, which she says is important, because it provides exposure to other cultures. Using before and after surveys of its members, Alight saw a 45% decrease in isolation and a 55% decrease in depression after participation in its community programs.
“What are some universal truths that someone who has experienced displacement needs or wants or will help them to heal and thrive?” Barnes asks. “Community, community, community.”
Individual acts and sweeping consequences
Following Lakanwal’s arrest in the D.C. shooting, Trump redoubled his efforts to clamp down on legal immigration to the U.S. and escalated his anti-immigrant rhetoric. The President said after the shooting in a post on Truth Social that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and “terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions,” without naming specific countries.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director Joe Edlow then announced that he had directed “a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern” and that all asylum decisions would be paused until the agency could “ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.” USCIS confirmed to TIME in an email that the countries “of concern” comprised the 19 nations the Administration imposed new travel bans and restrictions on in June—including Afghanistan.
The agency, which processes green card, visa, and naturalization requests, also published new guidance that explained its officers would “consider country-specific factors” when weighing immigration requests for applicants from those 19 countries. The Special Immigrant Visa program for Afghans who worked with the U.S. military, under which Yousify and many other Afghan veterans have resettled in the U.S., was additionally halted.
Read more: Trump Has Made Sweeping Changes to Immigration Since the D.C. Shooting. Here’s What We Know
Before moving to Washington state in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, Lakanwal was a part of a specialized unit under the CIA that hunted down Taliban commanders. He applied for asylum in 2024 while Biden was in office, a request that was granted earlier this year under the Trump Administration.
Trump has seized on the shooting and Lakanwal’s identification as the suspect to levy broader attacks against Afghan refugees and other immigrants. Asked if was blaming all Afghans for Lakanwal’s alleged actions, Trump told reporters, “no,” but added, “there’s a lot of problems with Afghans.”
“He went cuckoo. I mean, he went nuts,” the President said. “It happens too often with these people.”
Speaking about Lakanwal and Wali, Gafary, the attorney at Human Rights First, says to TIME that “it’s really unfortunate that the actions of a couple of individuals who clearly are mentally unwell and have suffered in ways that maybe most of us can’t even imagine, have been able to negatively impact hundreds of thousands of people that are here.”
“Those folks who worked alongside us back in Afghanistan” show an “eagerness to be part of the social fabric of this country,” Gafary says.
She also notes that not all Afghan refugees in the U.S. deal with the same challenges. “Many people in the demographic face these struggles, but not all, by and large,” she says.
And the Afghan veterans in the U.S. who do struggle with their mental health are not alone in those battles, emphasizes VanDiver, of #AfghanEvac.
“The mental health of the Afghan national population is no different than mental health for American veterans,” he says, noting that serving in the military can take the same toll on a person regardless of nationality.
Yousify only hopes that these violent incidents don’t divide the country, or suggest that the broader population of Afghan-Americans doesn’t have national pride in their new home.
“As a Muslim and as an Afghan, I want to say something here that can clarify a lot of things: Afghanistan as my motherland, that will be forever,” he says. “But the United States is my homeland.”
