20 years of 9/11: Biden led heartfelt act of homage to victims in New York

In the presence of the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and its predecessors Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, took place this Saturday in New York the commemoration of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which claimed nearly 3,000 victims of 90 nationalities. In the act, the names of those killed in this terrorist attack were read, who, by means of hijacked planes shortly after take-off, then crashed into the Twin Towers, the towering World Trade Center of the ‘era.

The United States this Saturday commemorated the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack, an event that in many ways changed the course of history not only in the country but around the world. Ceremonies at Ground Zero began with a minute of silence at 8:46 a.m. (12:46 p.m. GMT), when the first of four planes hijacked by 19 Islamist terrorists struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Later relatives, many in tears and friends began to read and remember 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 directed against the Capitol, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

Biden, and his wife Jill, as well as serving predecessors such as Bill Clinton and Barak Obama, took part in the Ground Zero ceremonies in New York, which took on special significance this year.

In addition to the uneven departure of American troops from Afghanistan after the return to power of the same Taliban expelled almost 20 years ago for having sheltered the ideologues of the attacks perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, there was a return to a certain normality after the covid-19 blow, which particularly hit New York. In a video posted the day before the anniversary, Biden called on Americans to unity. “For me, this is the main lesson of September 11. At a time of greatest vulnerability, (…) unity is our greatest strength,” the president said in his message.

In the midst of the excitement Bruce Springsteen sang “I’ll see you in my dreams” accompanied by his guitar.

Thousands of people came this week including New York, which woke up under heavy security measures, to pay tribute to the victims, including 2,753 died during the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Twenty years later, the emotion is still strong for this brutal attack which shocked a whole country and the whole world, it is not in vain that the victims were of 90 nationalities. The edge of the pools where the names of the 2,753 victims of the Twin Towers are inscribed it had been filling with flowers since Thursday.

In Ground Zero of the attacks, the tallest building in the country was erected, el One World Trade Center, with 541 meters high, a museum and two swimming pools where the twin towers were located.

“As a nation, this is one of the times – like the assassination of John F. Kennedy – when you remember what you were doing.”he told AFP Patricia Lithuanian, 52 years. “It affected everyone in one way or another,” he said. Josep dittmar he is one of the survivors of the towers. I was on the 105th floor of the South Tower that day in a meeting when the first plane crashed into the other twin tower.

Neither he nor his colleagues had a clue what was going on, but twenty years later, he remembers how few decisions he made at the time that saved his life. The only thing I had in mind was to go down the 105 floors as quickly as possible by the stairs and out onto the street. “I don’t feel guilty for surviving. I wonder how I survived, but I knew pretty quickly that what I had to do was keep telling the story in order to live.” he recently told AFP.

Arlene Sorano, At 68, she has a friend who lost her son. You have decided to come on this important anniversary to “honor the souls who have perished.”

Much has changed the world since the September 11 attacks, which perpetrated Al-Qaeda from Osama Bin Laden, later killed by the Americans in his refuge in Pakistan.

To the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, It was followed by the attacks in Bali (2002), Madrid (2004), London (2005), Bombay (2008) or Paris (2015) with an Islamist feel, or the emergence of groups like the Islamic State, which have raised the level of terror to unimaginable levels and established schools in many parts of the world. In the heat of revolts in favor of freedom and democracy in many countries of the Arab world during the so-called Arab Spring, many conflicts degenerated into atrocious civil wars as in Libya or Syria where Islamist groups belonging to Al Qaida or ISIS have also waged an all-out war that is spreading across the weak states of Africa.

The attacks have also profoundly changed the way of traveling with strong security measures in airports, planes, train or sea stations and the controls of intelligence services which are now part of the daily lives of travelers.

AFP / HB