South Tower Crash
United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the South Tower
9/11, also known as the September 11 attacks, were a series of four coordinated aircraft hijackings-turned-suicide attacks that occurred on 11 September 2001, with all of the attacks being located on the United States east coast. The al-Qaeda Salafist group hijacked four planes, with American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 flying into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, New York, American Airlines Flight 77 being crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and United Airlines Flight 93 being crashed into a field in Pennsylvania by the hijackers after the passengers attempted to retake control of the plane. A total of 2,996 people were killed in the attacks and 6,000 injured, including 19 hijackers, 343 firefighters, and 72 policemen in the deadliest terrorist attack in US history.
The US response to the attack was substantial: President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the extremist Taliban regime and destroy all of the al-Qaeda training camps, the CIA began a program of using unmanned aerial vehicles to target terrorist leaders in the Middle East, the Department of Homeland Security was formed, and government surveillance on the average citizen increased. The attacks led to a new era of world history, the War on Terror, as terrorism became the new largest threat to world security, and insurgencies broke out across the Muslim World by Islamist militants against secularist or pro-West governments.
al-Qaeda would be weakened during the invasion of Afghanistan, with their training camps destroyed and many leaders killed or captured, but the group still remained strong, eventually spreading to Iraq during the chaos of the Iraq War and also to Syria and Libya during their civil wars. Nineteen al-Qaeda members took part in the hijackings: Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, and Satam al-Suqami on American Airlines Flight 11; Marwan al-Shehhi, Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al-Shehri, Hamza al-Ghamdi, and Ahmed al-Ghamdi on United Airlines Flight 175; Hani Hanjour, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Salem al-Hazmi on American Airlines Flight 77; and Ziad Jarrah, Ahmed al-Haznawi, Ahmed al-Nami, and Saeed al-Ghamdi on United Airlines Flight 93. Ramzi bin al-Shibh was supposed to be one of the hijackers, but immigration officials prevented him from entering the USA; Zacarias Moussaoui, another 20th hijacker, was arrested after suspicious behavior during flight simulations, leading to the terrorists being forced to have four targets instead of five, with four hijackers on United 93 and five on each of the other three planes. In the aftermath of the attacks, many people in America and other countries were arrested for material support to the hijackers, and al-Qaeda would be hunted down in the following years as the world launched the War on Terror against the ascendant Islamist terrorist threat.
