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Nineteen terrorists, most of whom were Saudis, had hijacked four planes.
September 11, 2001
At 5:45 a.m. (US time), Mohammed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari pass through security at Portland Airport in Maine and board a shuttle flight – American Airlines Flight 11 – to Boston Airport. There were five hijackers on board when the flight took off at 7:59 am.
At 8:15 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 departed Boston and headed for Los Angeles. There are 51 passengers, nine crew members and five hijackers on board the plane. Four minutes later, the ground staff is warned of the hijacking by flight attendant Betty Ann Ong. At 8:20 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Dulles, outside Washington DC, for Los Angeles with five hijackers on board.
At 8:42 amUnited Flight 93 took off from Newark, New Jersey, headed for San Francisco, with four hijackers on the plane. Four minutes later, Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, killing all passengers. Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower of the WTC.
Sitting in a Florida elementary school classroom, President George Bush was informed at 9:05 a.m. of the largest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor during World War II. At 9:37 a.m., Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, the largest office, killing all passengers and 125 civilians and military personnel. Flight 93 crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania after the hijackers failed to direct the flight to its intended target, likely the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
Nineteen terrorists, most of whom were Saudis, had hijacked four planes. From the moment the first flight took off until the crash of Flight 93 in just two hours, the US was shaken to its core. The attack, orchestrated by Osama Binladen’s Al Qaeda, killed 3,000 people.
Immediate aftermath
President George Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. The goal was to destroy Al Qaeda and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden, and other high-ranking figures in the terrorist group and the Taliban.
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, bin Laden said in an interview with ABC-TV in 1998: “It is far better to kill a single American soldier than to waste his efforts on other activities… We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. We make no distinction between soldiers and civilians…They are all targets.’
Bin Laden found sanctuary in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province after moving from Sudan. He was behind attacks on Americans in the Middle East and Africa. The bombing of the US embassy in Kenya in 1998, which killed hundreds of people, and the sinking of the USS Cole in 2000, which killed 17 crew members, were part of his war against America.
On October 7, 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan and within two months the American-led coalition emerged victorious. The Taliban had fallen, but Osama Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan through the network of caves and tunnels in Tora Bora, where he was hunted down in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. The Americans established a pro-American regime led by the Northern Alliance and put themselves in place. For 20 years, the country spent a reported $2 trillion rebuilding Afghanistan, only to leave a power vacuum and the Taliban back in power in 2021 to bring power.
The US war on terror spread to Iraq and the American-led invasion began in 2003 to find “weapons of mass destruction” and end the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. When weapons of mass destruction turned out to be an illusion, a violent uprising arose. Saddam was captured, tried and hanged and democratic elections were held. In the years since, more than 4,700 American and allied troops have been killed, and more than a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed.
The toll on the people of America
The images of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers are etched in people’s minds. 9/11 took a devastating emotional toll. The CIA set out to track down and eradicate the country’s elaborate network of sleeper cells, establishing Guantanamo Bay in 2002, a detention camp where hundreds of terrorism suspects and “illegal enemy combatants” were held and reportedly tortured for years. .
The facility held about 800 prisoners at its peak, but they have since been slowly repatriated to other countries. Biden promised before his election to try to close Guantanamo, but it remains open.
23 years later
On the site where the Twin Towers once stood, there is a memorial to those who died in the terrorist attack. Pew research his study states, “It is difficult to think of an event that so profoundly changed American public opinion in so many dimensions as the September 11 attacks.”
The September 11 attacks resulted in changes in the federal government and an expansion of executive power. A new Cabinet department was created, the Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community was consolidated under the Director of National Intelligence to improve coordination among various agencies and departments.
New legislation, such as the US Patriot Act, expanded homeland security and surveillance, disrupted terrorist financing by cracking down on activities like money laundering, and increased efficiency within the US intelligence community.
In Afghanistan alone, more than 2,000 American soldiers died in twenty years of war, out of 176,000 casualties. Watson Institute study. The report states that 940,000 people were directly killed in the violent post-September 11 wars of aggression in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
After September 11, approximately 38 million people were displaced, becoming refugees as a result of the US wars against terrorism since 2001. II.”
In 2022, Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was killed in a US drone strike in the Afghan capital Kabul.
Under the 2020 Doha deal, the Taliban pledged that Afghanistan would not be used again as a launching pad for terrorism, but experts believe the group never severed ties with al-Qaeda. Zawahiri had been on the run for twenty years since the September 11 attacks. He took over al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden was killed.