On the morning of 9/11, 19 terrorist members of the Al Qaeda organization hijacked four commercial planes and crashed them into the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon, while a quarter fell in a field in Pennsylvania.
This September 11 marks 20 years since the most catastrophic terrorist attacks in the history of the United States, its main culprit was Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda, who planned for fifteen months an attack that brought down the so-called Twin Towers, the tallest buildings that existed to date and that were virtually the economic heart of New York.
According to Infobae, Bin Laden had long lived in hiding before the attacks, mainly because he was one of the main targets of the terrorist organization. However, on September 10, 2001, a day before the attacks, Bin Laden made a final call before executing the plan that would include the hijacking of four commercial aircraft and the death of thousands of people in US territory. .
According to a publication in Newsweek magazine, quoted by Infobae, the call was directed to Osama’s mother, a woman named Alia Ghanem and who was in her native Syria at the time.
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In that call, according to the publication, the terrorist leader was heard in an “almost farewell” tone, and what he communicated to his mother was that he could not communicate or meet with her for much of the day. time; moreover, he told her that in a few hours “something big” was going to happen, that is, the attack of “apocalyptic proportions” that Bin Laden had dreamed of for several years before executing his plan.
It was not until the day after the call that Ghanem learned what his son was referring to, moreover, on learning of the news of the attacks, which would go through the mainstream media worldwide in a matter of minutes. , he also knew he could never see it again.
On May 2, 2011, months before the tenth anniversary of the bombings, a U.S. Army Seal command placed the terrorist leader in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, killing him at the time. . The operation was monitored in real time by then-US President Barack Obama and his Vice President Joe Biden, who now rules the country from bars and stars.
The United States commemorates twenty years of the attacks
Twenty years after that day, the emotion is still alive in a country shocked by the attacks of September 11, 2001. That morning, 19 terrorists, mostly Saudi, members of the organization Al Qaeda, kidnapped four commercial planes and crashed them into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon on the outskirts of Washington, while a fourth, allegedly aimed at Congress, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
The grief is still alive in the families of the missing: “I have a feeling it just happened,” says Monica Iken-Murphy, widow of a 37-year-old stockbroker who worked on the 84th floor of the south tower.
President Biden and his wife Jill are expected in New York to take part in the tribute ceremony, in which, as every year, the names of the 2,977 people who died in the attacks will be read.
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The presidential couple, who will be accompanied by other former presidents at the event, will later travel to Pennsylvania and the Pentagon where they will also pay tribute to the victims and lay wreaths. The president is not expected to deliver a speech.
The so-called Zero Zone of Manhattan, where the Twin Towers once stood, has become a place of pilgrimage and homage to the dead. The two buildings were replaced by a monument, a huge pool-shaped fountain whose walls function as gentle waterfalls and bear the names of New York’s 2,753 victims.
On one side, in the 9/11 memorial museum, is a piece of staircase through which some of those who miraculously survived were able to escape, pieces of wall of buildings turned into a pile of rubble, steel beams twisted by the heat of fire that caused the impact of the planes loaded with fuel, photographs of the victims and the reconstruction with images of what was that frantic day that kept more than 2 billion people in the world hooked to their TVs , on the radio or on computer screens.
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