September 11, perhaps the most shocking event of the new millennium, like the "coming of age". The terrorist attack organized by Bin Laden through his Al Qaeda network turns exactly 18 today: it was in fact 11 September 2001, an unforgettable date in the collective imagination, when a series of four separate suicide attacks on US soil claimed the lives of 2.996 people (2.974 excluding the bombers) and other thousands of missing people never identified, especially those who died in the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York.
In detail, 246 people died on the four hijacked airplanes (87 on American Airlines Flight 11, 60 on United Airlines Flight 175, 59 on American Airlines Flight 77 and 40 on United Airlines Flight 93: there were no survivors), 2.603 New York and 125 at the Pentagon: alongside civilians, of 90 different nationalities, 343 firefighters, 72 police officers and 55 soldiers also perished. Of the Twin Towers' casualties, approximately 600 people were killed by the impact or died trapped on the upper floors in the South Tower, and at least 200 people jumped from the burning Towers and they died as they plummeted onto the streets and roofs of nearby buildings, hundreds of feet below. Some people who were in the Towers above the impact points climbed to the roofs of the buildings hoping to be rescued by helicopters, but the access doors to the roofs were closed.
- there were just four attacks: the two best known tore down both Twin Towers, another group of hijackers instead led American Airlines Flight 77 to crash into the Pentagon, while a fourth flight, United Airlines 93, with which the terrorists intended to hit the Capitol or the White House in Washington, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing the passengers of the flight but avoiding an even worse disaster.
In addition to the Twin Towers, the two 110-story skyscrapers, numerous other World Trade Center buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, including 7 World Trade Center, Six World Trade Center, Five World Trade Center, Four World Trade Center, Marriott World Trade Center, and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. The Deutsche Bank Building, located across Liberty Street from the World Trade Center complex, was demolished because the environment inside the building was toxic and uninhabitable. Fiterman Hall at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, located at 30 West Broadway, received severe and extensive damage during the attacks, leading to slated demolition.
The 11/XNUMX attacks are known to have resulted from Al Qaeda's stated goals as formulated in the fatwa issued by Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abū Yāsir Rifāʿī Ahmad Ṭāhā, Mir Hamza and Fazlur Rahman, which declared that it was “the duty of every Muslim […] to kill Americans everywhere”. The concrete idea of the September 11 attacks was then formulated by Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, who first presented it to Osama Bin Laden in 1996. Of the 19 hijackers, all of whom died, 15 were from Saudi Arabia, two from the UAE, one from Egypt and one from Lebanon. In contrast to the usual profile of suicide bombers, he made a sensation that the terrorists were well-educated, mature adults whose worldviews were well-formed.
The 11/XNUMX attacks had a immediate and overwhelming effect on the population of the United States of America. Many police officers and first responders from other parts of the country took time off from work to travel to New York to assist their colleagues in recovering bodies from the wreckage of the Twin Towers. Blood donations surged in the week following the attacks across the United States. For the first time in history, all civilian aircraft of the United States and other countries (such as Canada), which did not carry out emergency services, were immediately grounded, causing great inconvenience to tens of thousands of passengers around the world.
And then there were of course the geopolitical consequences, which many of us will remember and which conditioned conflicts for many years to come. The NATO Council declared that the attacks on the United States were considered an attack on all NATO countries and that, as such, they satisfied Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Soon after the attacks, the Bush administration declared war on terrorism, with the stated goal of bringing Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to justice and preventing the establishment of more terrorist networks. It began in the same 2001 with the invasion of Afghanistan, which was followed in 2003 by the war in Iraq, which led in 2006 to the fall and death of the dictator Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden, on the other hand, was only found and killed on May 2, 2011, almost 10 years after the attacks.
