September 11, 2001
At 5:45 a.m. (U.S. time), Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari go through security at Portland Airport in Maine and board a commuter flight – American Airlines Flight 11 – to Boston Airport. When the flight takes off at 7:59 a.m., there are five hijackers on board.
At 8:15 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 takes off from Boston for Los Angeles. The plane has 51 passengers, nine crew members, and five hijackers. Four minutes later, flight attendant Betty Ann Ong alerts ground personnel about the hijacking. At 8:20 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Dulles, outside Washington, D.C., for Los Angeles, with five hijackers on board.
At 8:42 a.m., United Flight 93 took off from Newark, New Jersey, and headed for San Francisco, with four hijackers on board. 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.
President George Bush, who was in an elementary school classroom in Florida, was informed at 9:05 am about the largest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor during World War II. At 9:37 am, Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, the largest office, killing all passengers and 125 civilian and military personnel. Flight 93 crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania after the hijackers failed to take the plane to its intended target, presumably the White House or the US Capitol.
Nineteen terrorists, most of them Saudis, hijacked four planes. In just two hours, from the first flight taking off to the crash of Flight 93, America was shaken to its core. 3,000 people were killed in the attack carried out by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.
Immediate Results
President George Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. Its goal was to destroy al-Qaeda and kill or capture its leader Osama bin Laden and other senior figures in the terrorist group and the Taliban.
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, in a 1998 interview with ABC-TV, bin Laden said, “It is better to kill a single American soldier than to have his hard work wasted in other activities…We believe that the worst thieves and the worst terrorists in the world today are Americans. We don’t distinguish between military and civilian…They are all targets.”
After arriving from Sudan, bin Laden found refuge in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province. He was behind attacks on Americans in the Middle East and Africa. The 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Kenya, which killed hundreds, and the sinking of the USS Cole in 2000, which killed 17 crew members, were part of his war against the US.
The US invaded Afghanistan on 7 October 2001 and the US-led coalition emerged victorious in two months. The Taliban fell, but Osama bin Laden fled to Pakistan through a network of caves and tunnels in Tora Bora, but was chased to Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011. The Americans installed a pro-US regime led by the Northern Alliance, entrenched themselves for 20 years and reportedly spent $2 trillion to rebuild Afghanistan, only to leave a power vacuum and bring the Taliban back to power in 2021.
The US war on terror spread to Iraq and a US-led invasion began in 2003, aimed at finding “weapons of mass destruction” and ending the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein. When weapons of mass destruction proved elusive, a violent uprising began. Saddam was captured, tried and executed, and democratic elections were held. In the years since, more than 4,700 US and allied troops have been killed, and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died.
The impact on people in America
The scenes of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers are etched in people’s minds. 9/11 delivered a devastating emotional blow. The CIA went on a quest to locate and destroy the complex network of sleeper cells in the mainland and in 2002 established Guantanamo Bay, a detention camp where hundreds of terrorism suspects and “illegal enemy combatants” were held and allegedly tortured for years.
The facility housed about 800 prisoners at its peak, but they have since been gradually repatriated to other countries. Biden promised to try to close Guantanamo before his election, but it remains open.
23 years later
There is a memorial near the Twin Towers to commemorate those who lost their lives in the terror attack. Pew Research said in its study, “It is difficult to think of a single event that has so profoundly changed American public opinion in so many dimensions as the 9/11 attacks.”
The 9/11 attacks resulted in changes to the federal government and an expansion of executive power. A new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security, was created, and the intelligence community was consolidated under a Director of National Intelligence to improve coordination between the various agencies and departments.
New laws such as the US Patriot Act expanded domestic security and surveillance, disrupted terrorist financing by cracking down on activities such as money laundering, and increased the efficiency of the U.S. intelligence community.
According to a Watson Institute study, more than 2,000 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan alone, out of 176,000 casualties in the 20-year war. The report says 940,000 people were directly killed in the violent wars that erupted after the 9/11 attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
Post 9/11, approximately 38 million people have been displaced, becoming refugees as a result of the wars fought by the US against terrorism since 2001. “This number exceeds the number of people displaced in every war since 1900, except for World War II,” the Watson Institute said.
In 2022, Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was killed in a drone strike by the US in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
Under the 2020 Doha Agreement, the Taliban promised not to allow Afghanistan to be used as a launchpad for terrorism again, but experts believe the group never severed its ties with al-Qaeda. Zawahiri remained on the run for 20 years after the 9/11 attacks. He took command of al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden was killed.