September 11 attacks

The September 11 attacks were a series of coordinated terrorist attacks carried out in the United States on 11 September 2001 by nineteen men acting for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda. The hijackers seized four airliners, crashing two into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon near Washington, while the fourth came down in a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in history.

Al-Qaeda had been founded in the late 1980s by Osama bin Laden and other veterans of the Soviet–Afghan War. In the 1990s bin Laden declared war on the United States, citing among other grievances the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, US support for Israel and sanctions against Iraq. The group bombed two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the warship USS Cole in 2000. By then it was based in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. The plan for the attacks is usually credited to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and was approved by bin Laden.

On the morning of 11 September, the hijackers, fifteen of them Saudi citizens, boarded four transcontinental flights from Boston, Newark and Washington Dulles, chosen because they carried large loads of fuel. Armed with knives and box cutters, they took control of the aircraft shortly after take-off. At 8:46 a.m. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and at 9:03 United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower, as millions watched on live television. At 9:37 American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense.

On United Airlines Flight 93, delayed in leaving Newark, passengers and crew learned through phone calls about the other attacks and tried to retake the plane. The hijackers crashed it into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03. Its intended target is believed to have been the Capitol or the White House.

Weakened by the impacts and the fires that followed, the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 and the North Tower at 10:28. A neighbouring building, 7 World Trade Center, collapsed later in the afternoon. In all, 2,977 victims died, not counting the hijackers: 2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 on Flight 93. They included 343 New York firefighters, and many more rescuers and residents later fell ill from exposure to the dust.

The US government blamed al-Qaeda within days. When the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden, the United States and its allies attacked Afghanistan in October 2001 and overthrew the Taliban government, beginning a war that lasted until 2021. The attacks led to a broader "war on terror", new security laws and agencies, tighter airport security around the world, and, in 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq, which the US government justified partly with reference to terrorism. Bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan in May 2011.

An independent commission reported in 2004 on the failures of intelligence and security that had allowed the plot to succeed. A memorial and museum now stand on the site of the twin towers, and a new One World Trade Center opened nearby in 2014.

Our 2000 and 2010 maps show the United States and Afghanistan just before the attacks and after the first years of the war that followed.