Ground Zero(65)

The Twin Towers had been built to withstand hurricane-force winds, and they had sprinklers and fire hydrants on each floor. But no one could have anticipated what thousands of gallons of burning jet fuel would do to the towers’ internal steel structures. City officials were convinced the buildings wouldn’t fall—right up until the moment that they did. Despite being hit second, the South Tower was the first to collapse at 9:59 a.m. The North Tower followed at 10:28 a.m., just 102 minutes—less than two hours—from the moment the first plane had struck. Both towers came almost straight down, their debris damaging buildings for blocks. Later that day, the forty-seven-story 7 World Trade Center collapsed due to damage it sustained when the North Tower came down.

An estimated 14,000 to 17,500 people were in the World Trade Center complex at the time of the attacks—far fewer than would have been in the buildings if the planes had hit later in the day. Miraculously, most people below the impact zones survived.

The number of dead and wounded is still horrifying: 2,977 victims died in the attacks, and an estimated 25,000 more people were injured. The number of dead includes 343 New York City firefighters who were working to rescue people in and around the towers when they came down. Sixty officers from the New York City Police Department and the Port Authority Police Department died in the collapse, as did eight emergency medical technicians and paramedics. Hundreds more rescue workers who worked at Ground Zero that day and in the months that followed have since died, many of them from exposure to toxins at the site. The September 11 attacks remain the deadliest incident for firefighters and law enforcement officials in the history of the United States, and the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history.

Like Brandon, there were children in the Twin Towers at the time of the attacks. All those children survived. Eight of the passengers on the planes were children, however, and they all died in the crashes. They ranged in age from two to eleven years old.

Twenty minutes before the South Tower came down, a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington, Virginia, right outside Washington, DC. The impact killed all 64 people on board, including the five hijackers, and another 125 victims in the building.

The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, was hijacked just after the second plane hit the South Tower. When the passengers on Flight 93 used phones on the planes to call their families, they learned about the attacks on the Twin Towers and on the Pentagon, and they knew their plane would be next. Monitoring the situation from the safety of Air Force One, the special plane that carries the president of the United States, President George W. Bush made the difficult decision to order F-16 fighter jets to shoot down Flight 93 if it got close to a major city.

Before the fighter pilots had to carry out that unimaginably terrible task, a group of brave passengers on board Flight 93 stormed the cockpit to try to wrestle control of the airplane away from the terrorists. During the struggle—right around the time the South Tower was collapsing—Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. To this day, no one knows the exact target of Flight 93. The plane was headed toward Washington, DC, and the White House and the Capitol were likely possibilities. Whatever the terrorists’ target was, the forty passengers and crew of Flight 93 stopped another deadly attack and may have saved many more lives by sacrificing their own.





All nineteen of the terrorists were men. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, and all were from middle-and upper-class families in the Middle East. Most of their mothers and fathers had no idea their sons had become terrorists. The young men had been recruited, radicalized, and trained by al Qaeda, a militant Islamic extremist group founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden and a number of other men who had fought together in the Soviet-Afghan War.

Born into a wealthy Saudi Arabian family, Osama bin Laden received an elite education before moving to Pakistan. There, with support from the American Central Intelligence Agency, bin Laden funded and trained mujahideen fighting in the Soviet-Afghan War. When that war ended, bin Laden founded al Qaeda to drive other “infidels” from Muslim lands, overthrow Arab governments supported by Western countries, and institute an extremist version of Islam as the law of the land. To achieve those goals, al Qaeda began a campaign of bombings and suicide attacks against military and civilian targets that continues to this day.

Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership chose the hijackers from the ranks of their organization and gave them their targets. Five of the hijackers moved to the United States over a year before the attacks, taking piloting classes and practicing on flight simulators. The other hijackers, the ones who would provide the “muscle” in subduing the crew and passengers, arrived in the US in early 2001. Bin Laden paid for all their housing and training, but it was the hijackers themselves who chose the day and the flights.

In the days after 9/11, when the United States was determined to find out who had planned the attacks, attention focused on Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were headquartered.





Afghanistan is roughly the size of Texas, and sits in a strategically important location between Europe and Asia. As Reshmina notes, the country has been invaded over the centuries by everyone from Alexander the Great to the United Kingdom.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1978 and finally withdrew in 1989. Then came a deadly civil war, after which the Taliban came to power. Despite Afghanistan’s desperate need for help after so many years of war, the Taliban refused any international assistance. They created what they called a “pure Islamic society,” which in reality was an authoritarian culture based on an extremist interpretation of Islamic law. They instituted restrictions on women and girls, made prayer required, and punished thieves by cutting off their hands or feet. Music and television were outlawed, and movie theaters were closed and turned into mosques. The Taliban held no elections either, claiming to rule by divine right.