23 Years After 9/11 Attacks: US War On Terror And How It Changed The World

September 11, 2001

At 5:45 am (US time) Mohammed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari pass through security at Portland Airport in Maine and board a commuter flight – American Airlines Flight 11 – to Boston airport. Five hijackers were on board when the flight took off at 7:59 am.

At 8:15 am, United Airlines Flight 175 took off from Boston and headed for Los Angeles. There are 51 passengers, nine crew members and five hijackers on the aircraft. Four minutes later, the ground personnel are alerted by flight attendant Betty Ann Ong of the hijacking. At 8:20 am, American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from Dulles outside Washington DC for Los Angeles with five hijackers on board. 

At 8:42 am, United Flight 93 took off from Newark, New Jersey, and headed for San Francisco, with four hijackers in the plane. Four minutes later, Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Centre’s North Tower, killing all passengers. Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 am, Flight 175 crashed into WTC’s South Tower.

President George Bush, who was in an elementary school classroom in Florida was informed at 9:05 am about the biggest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour during World War II. At 9:37 am, Flight 77  crashed into the Pentagon, the biggest office, killing all passengers and 125 civilian 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 US Capitol. 

Nineteen terrorists, most of them Saudis, had hijacked four planes. From the moment the first flight took off to the crash of Flight 93, in just two hours, the US was shaken to its core. The attack orchestrated by Osama Bin- laden’s Al Qaeda killed 3,000 people. 

Immediate Aftermath

President George Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan. The objective 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. 

As per the 9/11 Commission Report, Bin Laden, in an interview with ABC-TV in 1998 said, “It is far better to kill a single American soldier than to squander his efforts on other activities…We believe the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. We do not differentiate between military and civilian…They are all targets.” 

Bin Laden found a haven in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan, after moving from Sudan. 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 USS Cole in 2000 in which 17 crew members were killed were part of his war on America.

On October 7, 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan and in 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, only to be hunted down in Pakistan’s Abbottabad in 2011. The Americans established a pro-US regime led by the Northern Alliance, stationed 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 expanded 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 WMD proved illusory, a violent insurgency arose. Saddam was captured, tried, and hanged and democratic elections were held. In the years since there have been over 4,700 U.S. and allied troop deaths, and more than one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed. 

The Toll On People In America

The visuals of the planes crashing the Twin Towers are etched in the minds of people. 9/11 took a devastating emotional toll. The CIA went on a hunt to track down and eradicate the intricate network of sleeper cells in the mainland and the establishment of Guantanamo Bay in 2002, a detention camp where hundreds of terrorism suspects and “illegal enemy combatants” were kept and reportedly tortured for years. 

The facility held roughly 800 prisoners at its peak, but they have since slowly been repatriated to other countries. Biden pledged before his election to try to shut down Guantanamo, but it remains open.

23-Years-Later

A memorial exists where the Twin Towers once stood to remember those who lost their lives in the terror attack. Pew Research in its study said, “It is difficult to think of an event that so profoundly transformed US public opinion across 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 the Director of National Intelligence to improve coordination between various agencies and departments. 

New legislation, such as the US Patriot Act expanded domestic security and surveillance, disrupted terrorist funding by cracking down on activities such as money laundering, and increased efficiency within the U.S. intelligence community.

In Afghanistan alone, over 2,000 US soldiers died in 20 years of war out of 176,000 casualties, according to Watson Institute’s study. The report states that 940,000 people were killed directly in the violent post-9/11 attack wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

Post-9/11, approximately 38 million people have been displaced, making them refugees as a result of the wars the US fought on terror since 2001. The Watson Institute said, “This exceeds those displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II.”

In 2022, Al Qaeda Chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and a mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was killed in a drone strike carried out by the US in the Afghan capital Kabul. 

Under the 2020 Doha deal, the Taliban promised not to allow Afghanistan to be used again as a launchpad for terrorism, but experts believe the group never broke their ties with Al-Qaeda. Zawahiri had been on the run for 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. He took over Al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden was killed.