9/11 attacks

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, nineteen members of al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger planes on the US East Coast. At 8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, hitting floors 93 to 99. At 9:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower, floors 77 to 85, in front of live television cameras. At 9:37 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the west side of the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US military, outside Washington. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. after its passengers, who had learned of the other attacks by phone, fought the hijackers for control of the plane; it was probably heading for the Capitol.

Between 16,000 and 18,000 people were inside the World Trade Center complex when the planes hit, and most of them got out. The burning jet fuel weakened the steel of the two 110-storey towers: the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., the North Tower at 10:28 a.m., and the five other buildings of the complex were destroyed with them. Lower Manhattan was buried in dust, and the fires in the rubble smouldered for months. The attacks killed 2,977 people from 90 countries: 2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 on Flight 93, not counting the hijackers. Among the dead were hundreds of firefighters and police officers who had gone into the towers as everyone else was coming out.

The attacks were planned by al-Qaeda, the militant Islamist network that Osama bin Laden ran from Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed organised the operation and Mohammed Atta led the hijackers. Bin Laden believed the United States was weaker than it looked and would pull out of the Middle East if it was hit hard enough, as it had pulled out of Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.

The response reshaped American and world politics. President George W. Bush declared a “war on terrorism”; within weeks the United States invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban, and in 2003 it invaded Iraq. At home, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which widened the surveillance powers of the police and intelligence agencies, a new Department of Homeland Security was created, and air travel everywhere became a matter of security checks. Bin Laden was hunted for almost ten years and killed by US forces in Pakistan in 2011.

The 9/11 Memorial now stands on the site: two pools set in the footprints of the towers, the names of the dead cut into the bronze around their edges, and a museum beneath them that holds the twisted steel. The toxic dust left tens of thousands of responders and residents with chronic illness, and a federal health programme still follows more than 100,000 of them. The attacks set the course of the early twenty-first century: two long wars, a global security state, and a lasting change in how the West and the Muslim world saw each other.