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The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, [e] were four coordinated Islamist suicide terrorist attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda against the United States on September 11, 2001. That morning, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the East Coast to California.
- Casualties of The September 11 Attacks
The September 11 attacks of 2001 were the deadliest...
- American Airlines Flight 11
American Airlines Flight 11 was a domestic passenger flight...
- Timeline for The Day of The September 11 Attacks
The September 11 attacks of 2001, in addition to being a...
- Simple English
The September 11 attacks (also known as 9/11) [nb 1] were...
- United Airlines Flight 175
United Airlines Flight 175 was a domestic passenger flight...
- Collapse of The World Trade Center
The World Trade Center in New York City collapsed on...
- Closings and Cancellations
Many closings and cancellations followed the September 11,...
- Hijackers in The September 11 Attacks
The hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men...
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- Casualties of The September 11 Attacks
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The September 11 attacks were a series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks committed in 2001 by 19 terrorists associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil; nearly 3,000 people were killed. The attacks involved the hijacking of four planes, three of which were used to strike significant U.S. sites. American Airlines flight 11 and United Airlines flight 175 were flown into the World Trade Center’s north and south towers, respectively, and American Airlines flight 77 hit the Pentagon. United Airlines flight 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers attempted to overpower the hijackers. The plane was believed to be headed to the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.
Timeline of the September 11 Attacks
Read more about the events on that day.
How many people were killed in the September 11 attacks?
The exact number of victims—particularly the number of those killed at the World Trade Center—is not definitively known. However, the official death toll, after numerous revisions and not including the 19 terrorists, was set at 2,977 people. At the World Trade Center in New York City, 2,753 people died, of whom 343 were firefighters. The death toll at the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., was 184, and 40 individuals died outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Who planned the September 11 attacks?
The September 11 attacks were precipitated in large part because Osama bin Laden, the leader of the militant Islamic organization al-Qaeda, held naive beliefs about the United States in the run-up to the attacks. Abu Walid al-Masri, an Egyptian who was a bin Laden associate in Afghanistan in the 1980s and ’90s, explained that, in the years prior to the attacks, bin Laden became increasingly convinced that America was weak. “He believed that the United States was much weaker than some of those around him thought,” Masri remembered, and “as evidence he referred to what happened to the United States in Beirut when the bombing of the Marines base led them to flee from Lebanon,” referring to the destruction of the marine barracks there in 1983 (see 1983 Beirut barracks bombings), which killed 241 American servicemen. Bin Laden believed that the United States was a “paper tiger,” a belief shaped not just by America’s departure from Lebanon following the marine barracks bombing but also by the withdrawal of American forces from Somalia in 1993, following the deaths of 18 U.S. servicemen in Mogadishu, and the American pullout from Vietnam in the 1970s.
The key operational planner of the September 11 attacks was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (often referred to simply as “KSM” in the later 9/11 Commission Report and in the media), who had spent his youth in Kuwait. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed became active in the Muslim Brotherhood, which he joined at age 16, and then went to the United States to attend college, receiving a degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1986. Afterward he traveled to Pakistan and then Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviet Union, which had launched an invasion against Afghanistan in 1979.
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According to Yosri Fouda, a journalist at the Arabic-language cable television channel Al Jazeera who interviewed him in 2002, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned to blow up some dozen American planes in Asia during the mid-1990s, a plot (known as “Bojinka”) that failed, “but the dream of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed never faded. And I think by putting his hand in the hands of bin Laden, he realized that now he stood a chance of bringing about his long awaited dream.”
In 1996 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed met bin Laden in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. The 9-11 Commission (formally the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States), set up in 2002 by U.S. Pres. George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress to investigate the attacks of 2001, explained that it was then that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “presented a proposal for an operation that would involve training pilots who would crash planes into buildings in the United States.” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed dreamed up the tactical innovation of using hijacked planes to attack the United States, al-Qaeda provided the personnel, money, and logistical support to execute the operation, and bin Laden wove the attacks on New York and Washington into a larger strategic framework of attacking the “far enemy”—the United States—in order to bring about regime change across the Middle East.
Responsibility for the September 11 attacks; al-Qaeda; Osama bin Laden; Hijackers in the September 11 attacks; 20th hijacker; Alleged Saudi role in the September 11 attacks; Consequences. Aftermath of the September 11 attacks; Reactions to the September 11 attacks; Closings and cancellations following the September 11 attacks
Sep 11, 2001 · Some conspiracy theorists believe that members of the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, but a bipartisan commission found al-Qaeda completely responsible for the attacks, and Osama bin Laden also maintained that he and the rest of al-Qaeda were responsible.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airliners in the United States and tried to crash them into large buildings, succeeding in three cases. American Airlines Flight 11, having departed from Boston, was flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 08:46.
By Katherine Huiskes. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. On September 11, 2001, 2,977 people were killed in the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history. The World Trade Center in March, 2001 Wikimedia Commons. The moment shocked the nation.
