Fallout of attacks continues to ripple across the globe after US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq led to further instability, return and creation of new extremist groups
The chaos and terror that swept across the nation 23 years ago is increasingly becoming a distant memory for many Americans, even as the global shockwaves that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks continue to be felt.
For those who lived through that terrifying and sobering morning, watching as scene after scene of carnage unfolded in New York City before spreading further, the horror lives on.
It all started when a passenger plane slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46 a.m. on a busy Tuesday morning. Just 17 minutes later, another plane struck the South Tower.
The massive 110-story skyscrapers, burning and badly damaged by the plane strikes, would collapse within minutes of one another, sending a thick cloud of toxic dust and ash ripping through the streets of Manhattan as people desperately ran away in terror.
Amid the devastation in New York, another plane struck the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. at 9.37 a.m.
A national panic not seen since Pearl Harbor, some 60 years prior, had rapidly set in.
Just minutes after the Defense Department was struck, authorities closed all US airspace, but United Airlines Flight 93 had already been overrun.
Passengers and crew were rushing to the cockpit in an effort to wrest control of the plane from the four hijackers. About five minutes later, the plane would jackknife into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all onboard.
The plane was about 20 minutes flying time from Washington, D.C., where authorities believe the hijackers sought to strike either the White House or the US Capitol.
It would take time, but Americans would eventually find out that 19 al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible for hijacking the four passenger planes in a plot orchestrated by the terror group's longtime leader, Osama bin Laden.
A total of 2,977 people were killed on Sept. 11. Thousands more were injured that day. An estimated 400,000 other victims, including firefighters and police who worked tirelessly to rescue as many survivors as possible, were exposed to the carcinogenic dust cloud that swept through New York City when the World Trade Center collapsed.
The fallout has been nothing short of disastrous.
- And so began the War on Terror
With the nation scrambling for answers, President George W. Bush would quickly go on the offensive, telling all nations worldwide that if they harbor al-Qaeda, its operatives or its leaders, the US would take action: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
“From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime,” Bush said during a joint address to Congress nine days after the attacks, putting the US squarely on a war footing.
“The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows,” he added.
In just three weeks, Bush would begin what would become America's longest war when he invaded Afghanistan, the country from which bin Laden and al-Qaeda planned and executed the devastating Sept. 11 attacks.
The Global War on Terror had officially begun.
The Taliban government would quickly collapse in the face of the vastly superior US military, but the militants would go on to stage a two-decade long insurgency against American and allied forces in Afghanistan, striking from the shadows.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared an end to “major combat” operations in Afghanistan on May 1, 2003, but the US occupation of the Central Asian country would continue for 18 years until President Joe Biden withdrew all American forces in 2021.
The Taliban rapidly returned to power as US and international troops left Afghanistan, ousting the internationally-recognized government and reimposing their hardline grip on the impoverished nation.
- US launches war on Iraq, but never finds alleged weapons of mass destruction
Just a year-and-a-half after Bush declared war on the Taliban, he began a second front in the War on Terror in far-away Iraq.
The pretext for this war was Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. But evidence of the program, detailed before the UN Security Council by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, was never found.
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions,” Powell told the Council one month before the March 2003 invasion. “What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
No chemical or biological weapons were ever recovered, despite robust investigative efforts after Saddam and his military were eliminated. Powell later reflected that the Feb. 5, 2003 speech was his singular greatest regret during his decades of public service.
Like the Taliban, Saddam's forces rapidly fell apart in the face of US military power, but like what happened in Afghanistan, an insurgency would form that would bring with it years of violence against coalition forces until the US withdrew in 2011.
- Legacy of torture mars War on Terror
The kinetic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dominated international and domestic headlines for years. But below the surface, US intelligence agencies were carrying out a far more secretive war that involved clandestine renditions of terror suspects, CIA black sites, and a program whose name would become a euphemism for torture.
The “Enhanced Interrogation Program,” as it would be known, was implemented worldwide with hundreds of detainees being subjected, most notably at the infamous US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The interrogation program was publicly detailed in a damning 500-page Senate Intelligence Committee report that was released in redacted form in 2014.
“CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values,” Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein wrote in the report.
“It is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured. I also believe that the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized and unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel, inhuman and degrading. I believe the evidence of this is overwhelming and incontrovertible,” she added.
The report brought to light systemic, widespread abuses perpetrated by CIA officers, including the now infamous practice of waterboarding, placing detainees in extended periods of stress positions, sleep deprivation and punitive forced rectal feeding and rehydration.
It further said the CIA's justifications for the program, based on its alleged effectiveness, were “inaccurate.” A review of 20 cases used by the agency to justify the enhanced interrogation techniques found that there was either no link between torture that was used and counterterrorism successes or found that the CIA falsely claimed a correlation between the intelligence it gained and the methods used.
The report determined that in such cases, the intelligence was either gained from a detainee prior to interrogation or was already available to the CIA from other sources.
- Clandestine US operation kills bin Laden not in Afghanistan, but in neighboring Pakistan
It took a decade for the US to find and kill bin Laden. Ultimately, the al-Qaeda leader was not found in Afghanistan, where he had been holed up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
He was discovered across the border in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, residing in a sprawling compound less than one mile from the country's premier military academy.
On May 2, 2011, a pair of previously undisclosed modified Black Hawk stealth helicopters crossed the Pakistani border, flying fast and low as they closed in on bin Laden's safe house. As soon as they reached their target, US special operations forces rapidly disembarked, entered the compound and killed the al-Qaeda leader, taking his body for confirmation.
Bin Laden was subsequently buried at sea after a positive identification was made in what marked the most significant US victory in the war on terror.
- Rise of Daesh/ISIS poses far greater threat than al-Qaeda
The victory proved short-lived, however. Just three years later, a new terror group would rise from the remnants of Saddam's Baathist military before spreading worldwide.
Daesh/ISIS gained global attention when it rapidly overran vast swathes of Syria and then Iraq as it announced the formation of its self-styled caliphate in 2014. Adherents from around the globe would flock to join the terror group's ranks as its territorial grip grew.
At its height, Daesh/ISIS controlled one-third of Syria and 40% of Iraq amid widespread instability, claiming major cities including Mosul and Raqqa and bringing with it an iron-fisted fundamentalist rule. That was something al-Qaeda only ever aspired to.
While it no longer lays formal claim to any territory in either country following a years-long international military campaign led by the US, Daesh/ISIS maintains cells in the region and has grown to include affiliates as far afield as West Africa and Afghanistan.
It was, in fact, Daesh/ISIS's affiliate in the country that claimed a deadly 2021 suicide bombing on Kabul's international airport as US troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan, killing 13 US troops and nearly 170 civilians.
The terror group's Afghanistan branch has gone on to carry out a series of other attacks on the Taliban following the US exit.
US forces, meanwhile, continue to carry out operations around the world, including in Afghanistan, aimed at eliminating the group. There continues to be no end in sight.
