The United States commemorates this Saturday the 20th anniversary of the worst bombings in its history, which left nearly 3,000 dead on September 11, 2001, still shocked by a fact that changed in many ways the course of history not only in the country but in the whole world.
The ceremonies in the Zero Zone began with a minute of silence at 08:46 (12:46 GMT), the time when the first of four planes hijacked by 19 Islamist terrorists hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. .
Then family, many in tears and friends began reading and remembering each of the 2,975 victims of the attacks with four commercial planes launched against the Twin Towers, the Pentagon near Washington, and a fourth, presumably aimed at the Capitol, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field.
U.S. President Joe Biden and his wife Jill, as well as predecessors in office such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, participated in Zero Zone at the ceremonies in New York, which took on special significance this year. .
To the rugged departure of US troops from Afghanistan after the return to power of the Taliban themselves whom they evicted almost 20 years ago to welcome the ideologues of the attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda, was added the return to a certain normality after the clawing of the covid-19, which raged particularly with New York.
In a video posted on the eve of the anniversary, Biden called on Americans to drive.
“For me it is the main lesson of 9/11. At the time of greatest vulnerability, (…) unity is our greatest strength,” the president said in his message.
Amidst the excitement, Bruce Springsteen sang accompanied by his guitar “I’ll see you in my dreams” (I’ll see you in my dreams).
Many people have traveled this week, especially to New York, which woke up under heavy security measures to pay tribute to the victims, 2,753 of them in the Twin Towers.
– Live emotion –
Twenty years later, the emotion is still alive for this brutal attack that shocked an entire country and the world, not in vain the victims were 90 nationalities. The edge of the pools where the names of the 2,753 victims of the Twin Towers are inscribed had been filled with flowers since Thursday.
In the Zero Zone of the attacks, the tallest building in the country has been erected, the One World Trade Center, 541 meters high, a museum and two swimming pools where the Twin Towers used to be.
“As a nation, it’s one of those moments – like the assassination of John F. Kennedy – that you remember what you were doing,” Patricia Litewski, 52, told AFP. “It affected everyone in one way or another,” he assured.
Josep Dittmar is one of the survivors of the towers. That day he was on the 105th floor of the south tower at a meeting when the first plane crashed into the other twin tower.
Neither he nor his colleagues had any idea what was going on but twenty years later he remembers how small decisions he made at the time saved his life. The only thing I had in mind was to go down the 105 floors down the stairs as soon as possible and out into the street.
“I don’t feel guilty for surviving. I wonder how I survived, but I learned relatively quickly that what I had to do was keep telling the story in order to live,” he told AFP recently.
Arlene Sorano, 68, has a friend who lost her son. He has decided to come to this significant anniversary to “honor the souls who died.”
– Another world –
Much has changed in the world since the 9/11 attacks perpetrated by Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, which was later shot down by Americans at their refuge in Pakistan.
The US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was followed by attacks on Bali (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005), Bombay (2008) and Islamist Paris (2015), or the emergence of groups such as the Islamic State, which have brought terror levels to unimaginable heights and created schools in many regions of the world.
In the heat of the revolts in favor of the freedom and the democracy in many countries of the Arab world during the call Arab Spring, many conflicts were entrenched in atrocious civil wars like Libya or Syria where the Islamist groups pertaining to Al Qaeda or EI also waged a quarterless war that is spreading to weak states in Africa.
The attacks also profoundly changed the way we travel with strong security measures at airports, planes, train or boat stations and controls of the intelligence services that are now part of the day-to-day lives of travelers.