25 Years Since 9/11: The Day That Shook The World
Thousands were killed when hijacked planes slammed into, and brought down, the twin towers, triggering the war on terror
The Year is 2001, the Month is September, the Date is 11th, and the Day is Tuesday. The sun dawns clear over Lower Manhattan. Meteorologists later call it a "severe clear" day: cloudless sky, low humidity, a light northwesterly breeze. Commuters pour out of the PATH station at the World Trade Centre, clutching coffee cups and newspapers.
Office workers ride the elevators up into the Twin Towers, home to Cantor Fitzgerald, Marsh & McLennan, and dozens of financial firms. Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the North Tower, prepares for a breakfast conference. Firefighters at nearby stations finish their overnight shift changeovers.
Wall Street readies for a normal trading day. Nobody in the city yet knows that four commercial aircraft have already been hijacked or are minutes from being seized.
The Timeline Of Attacks
At 07:59, American Airlines Flight 11 departs Boston's Logan Airport bound for Los Angeles, carrying 92 people. Hijackers, led by Mohamed Atta, storm the cockpit around 08:14 using knives and mace, and the plane veers south towards New York.
At 08:46, Flight 11 slams into the North Tower of the World Trade Center between the 93rd and 99th floors, killing everyone aboard and hundreds inside instantly. Many in New York initially assume a small aircraft has strayed off course.
At 08:14, United Airlines Flight 175, also from Boston to Los Angeles, is hijacked shortly after takeoff. It carries 65 people.
At 09:03, live television cameras already trained on the burning North Tower capture Flight 175 banking sharply and crashing into the South Tower between the 77th and 85th floors. It becomes clear this is a coordinated attack, not an accident.
At 08:20, American Airlines Flight 77 leaves Washington Dulles for Los Angeles with 64 people aboard. Hijackers take control roughly half an hour later and turn the aircraft back towards Washington, DC.
At 09:37, Flight 77 strikes the Pentagon's western façade, killing all aboard and 125 people inside the building.
At 08:42, United Airlines Flight 93 departs Newark for San Francisco with 44 people aboard, delayed on the runway before takeoff. Hijackers seize the cockpit around 09:28. Passengers and crew, learning by phone of the earlier attacks, resolve to fight back.
Around 09:57, several storm the cockpit. At 10:03, Flight 93 crashes into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, short of its presumed target in Washington. All 44 aboard die, but the intended fourth strike is averted.
This Is Not Over, Yet
At 09:59, the South Tower collapses in roughly ten seconds, sending a grey ash cloud billowing through the streets of Lower Manhattan.
At 10:28, the North Tower follows.
President George W Bush was visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, when Chief of Staff Andrew Card leaned in during a classroom reading session at 09:05 and told him a second plane had hit the World Trade Centre.
Bush remains seated with the schoolchildren for several more minutes before excusing himself. He makes a brief statement to the press shortly after 09:30, calling it an "apparent terrorist attack," then boards Air Force One, which departs Sarasota just before 09:55 amid uncertainty about further threats.
The plane diverts first to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where Bush records a short televised statement, and then to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where he convenes the National Security Council by video link from an underground bunker.
He returns to Washington that evening and, at 20:30, delivers a televised address from the Oval Office, pledging to hunt down those responsible and declaring that the United States will "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbour them."
Casualties
The attacks killed 2,977 people that morning (excluding the 19 hijackers), a figure that later rose to 2,996 once deaths from exposure to Ground Zero's toxic dust were added to the official count between 2007 and 2011.
The World Trade Centre accounted for the overwhelming majority, with an estimated 1,700 victims from the North Tower and around 1,000 from the South Tower.
The Pentagon lost 125 people, and all 246 passengers and crew aboard the four hijacked aircraft died, including the 40 aboard Flight 93. 343 members of the Fire Department of New York and 72 law enforcement officers died in the collapses.
The attacks left more than 3,000 children without a parent. At least 102 countries lost citizens that day. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum's records list nine names of Indians inscribed on the memorial panels: Ganesh K Ladkat, Anil Shivhari Umarkar, Sushil S Solanki, Alok Kumar Mehta, Shekhar Kumar, Alok Agarwal, Jayesh Shantilal Shah, Yudhvir S Jain and Hashmukh C Parmar.
The "War" On Terror
Within weeks, the attacks remade American law and foreign policy: the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and an invasion of Afghanistan that ran for two decades in pursuit of the man who had ordered the attacks -- Osama bin Laden.
The invasion of Afghanistan that followed toppled the Taliban within weeks, but the stated aim, killing or capturing bin Laden, went unmet. In December 2001, American bombers dropped roughly 700,000 pounds of ordnance on the cave complex at Tora Bora over a matter of days, believing bin Laden was cornered inside. He was.
US commanders had relied on Afghan militia to seal the mountain passes, and sometime around 16 December, bin Laden and his bodyguards walked out through a gap in the encirclement and crossed into Pakistan's tribal areas, where al Qaeda chief would remain hidden for nearly a decade.
The war that began that winter in Afghanistan did not end for 20 years. By the time the last American troops left Kabul in August 2021, the conflict had killed an estimated 176,000 to 241,000 people, including more than 46,000 Afghan civilians, roughly 2,450 American service members and thousands of contractors, at a cost to the United States of more than $2 trillion.
The Taliban, the government, the invasion had been launched to remove, retook the country in eleven days.
Bin Laden was eventually found not by the army sent after him in 2001, but by a CIA trail that led to a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a short walk from that country's military academy.
On 2 May 2011, a team of US Navy SEALs raided the compound and killed him. That night, President Barack Obama addressed the nation to announce it, closing with four words that, for a country that had spent almost a decade waiting to hear them.
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