9-11-2001 - a date that went down in modern American history, 9 years ago. Two planes were hijacked and purposely flown into the the Twin Towers, a trade center in New York. This caused the deaths of over 3000 American citizens, but it also brought our nation together and inspired a revival of patriotism like we hadn't seen in a while.
The planes that day were hijacked by the terrorist group al-Qaeda (which I did an assigned blog on last year for CWI around this time of year). al-Qaeda, meaning "the base" in arabic, was founded in the 80s and is led by Osama Bin Laden. They are a multi-national group mainly residing in the Middle East (Afghanostan, Iraq and Iran, etc) They are Muslim/Islam-based, and have attcked a few times over the years, mostly in America. They consider what they do ok because its a "holy war". Their goal is to put the world in "jihad", or a struggle for God.
After the 9-11 attck, the US declared a "war on terrorism" and began sending troups to Iraq, both to fight terrorism and stabalize their government, keeping it out of al-Qaeda and the Taliban's hands, instiling democracy, etc. We've had troups in the Middle East for about 8 years, and have made a few attempts to pull out, but we couldn't just leave our work unfinished, since that would let the terrorist groups take over again. But now I think we're actually getting troups home again.
I was in 1st grade when 9-11 happened. I remember the teachers all went to the library to watch something on TV, but they didn't tell us what was going on (maybe they told the older kids, but not the younger ones, idk.). I remember some of them were crying, too. When i got home and found out what happened, I only understood that lots of people had died all of a sudden, but that was pretty much it.
Aerial view of the Tiwn Towers aftermath.
Twin Towers, pre-terrorist attack.
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