Retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant Edward Gonzalez watched CIA-trained Afghan units run over civilians with trucks at Kabul International Airport in August 2021. Not metaphorically. He watched them drive vehicles into crowds and shoot unarmed people to clear the perimeter so American forces could flee.
"They straight up executed people, ran them over," Gonzalez said. "I literally saw trucks running over people."
Five years later — on the anniversary of the Abbey Gate bombing that killed 13 American servicemembers — newly surfaced documents and testimony reveal the full scope of what those CIA-trained units, known as Zero Units, actually did during the evacuation. And it's worse than the sanitized version we were fed.
Retired Marine Sergeant Josephy Laude confirmed what Gonzalez described. "They would use vehicles, they would run people over, they would execute people... shoot into the crowds," Laude said. These weren't rogue actors. These were Afghan special forces trained, funded, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency. A Wall Street Journal documentary titled "The Path to Zero" documented that one Zero Unit alone conducted 107 raids and killed 452 civilians over a four-year period.
Four hundred and fifty-two civilians. One unit.
And when it came time to evacuate Kabul, these units weren't left behind. Of the 124,000 people evacuated in August 2021, approximately 30,000 — roughly 25 percent of the total — were Zero Unit members and their families. They got priority boarding. Meanwhile, loyal Afghan interpreters who spent years risking their lives alongside American soldiers were abandoned at the gates.
Retired Army Colonel Seth Krummich put it plainly to those interpreters: "There's no way to sugarcoat it: We abandoned you."
The Pentagon knew exactly who it was evacuating and what they had done. Retired Marine General Kenneth F. McKenzie, who commanded the withdrawal, described the Zero Units as "vital to the success of our mission." Vital. The units executing civilians in the street were vital.
Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California, connected the obvious dot: "Obviously, that's why we got people in this country we shouldn't have." He wasn't speculating. One evacuated Zero Unit member, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was indicted on June 16 after shooting two Army National Guard soldiers on November 26, 2025. Specialist Sarah Beckstrom was killed. Sergeant Andrew Wolfe was wounded.
So the sequence is: CIA trains Afghan units. Afghan units execute civilians. Pentagon evacuates them ahead of interpreters. One of them shoots American soldiers on American soil. And the documents proving the civilian executions were sat on for five years.
Sean Parnell, now chairing the Afghanistan Withdrawal Review Panel as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, is the reason these records are finally surfacing. The Biden administration had no interest in this review. The current administration does.
The left will frame any scrutiny of the withdrawal as "relitigating" a closed chapter. Which is a convenient position when the chapter includes CIA-backed death squads clearing crowds so the evacuation numbers looked good on cable news. The 124,000 figure was the talking point. Nobody asked how the perimeter got cleared.
Thirteen servicemembers came home in coffins from Abbey Gate. An unknown number of Afghan civilians were executed by units we trained and then rewarded with evacuation. And one of those evacuees repaid the favor by killing an American soldier in the country we brought him to.
That's not a withdrawal. That's a cover-up with a boarding pass.
