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| WTC smoking on 9/11. Photo: Wikimedia |
What happened on september 11, 2001?
Twenty-one years ago the bombing of the Twin Towers changed the world forever. That day thousands of innocent people lost their lives and a new war against Islamic terrorism began.
September 11, 2001 is an indelible date in everyone's mind: two planes crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, a third plane crashed into the Pentagon (i.e. the United States military command building) and a fourth crashed on a field in the US state of Pennsylvania.
All four planes had been hijacked by Islamic terrorists of the organization called Al-Qaeda, controlled by the international criminal Osama Bin Laden, already involved in 1998 in terrorist attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The victims were 2,083, between airplane passengers and people who at that moment were working in the Twin Towers ("twin towers", in fact).
Live tragedy
Televisions, radios, newspapers, the internet have made the whole planet participate in what was happening through live films. Thousands of people who were in the vicinity of the tragedy helped the survivors trapped under the rubble. Millions and millions of people experienced those dramatic hours on live internet and TV. In those moments the world as we knew it was changing !
The American astronaut Frank Culbertson, who in those hours was in orbit around the Earth aboard the International Space Station, in the company of two Russian cosmonauts, not knowing what was happening on earth, as he passed the space station right over New York, made a video of the smoke billowing over Manhattan.
A wound that changed the world
Many of you weren't born yet or were very small, but that deadly event changed world history forever because, following that terrorist attack, just one month later (October 7, 2001), America first invaded Afghanistan, a Central Asian country believed to be the base of Al-Qaeda terrorists and a refuge for their leader Osama Bin Laden. And then, in 2003, he also invaded Iraq because, lying, they said that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (that is, very powerful ones) and had financed Osama Bin Laden's attacks.
Today, after 21 years, the situation in Afghanistan is still without peace - the return of the Taliban has once again erased the political gains obtained in the field of rights, especially as regards women - and the same is happening in Iraq. And in recent years a new terrible actor has taken the place of Al-Qaeda: it's called ISIS.
Read also:
• The National September 11 Memorial & Museum
