Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of an event that changed the trajectory of history in this new millennium: “9/11”. That readers need no information other than those two numbers to know what event is being identified attest to the universal acknowledgement of the impact of what happened on that fateful day of September 11, 2001. The facts are stark: four planes were hijacked by 19 individuals who used them as missiles to dive into identified targets on the US eastern seaboard.
Two were hurled into the 110-storey twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City with thousands of workers inside to bring them down. One was plunged into the Pentagon, the US military headquarters outside Washington DC and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania on route to what investigators believe was the White House or the Capitol Building. In total, 2996 died: 372 were non- Americans (including the 19 perpetrators) from 90 countries, among them three Guyanese. Two hundred and sixty-five were from the four planes, 2606 from the WTC and 125 from the Pentagon.
While in the broad canvass of war through the ages, the fatalities were not extraordinary – 66,000 died from the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima – the 9/11 fatalities were not an action carried out during a declared war between the US and another country, but by a private organisation. Secondly, and very germanely, for the first time since the 1812 war by Britain against the American Republic, there was an attack on American soil. This shook up America.
While the word “terrorism” had entered the lexicon since the “Terror” of the French revolutionaries back in the 1890s, it took on a whole new meaning after 9/11. Terrorists were now defined as private citizens who used violence against civilian and governmental targets to make a political point against a state. The George Bush Government’s immediate declaration of a “War against Terrorism” also pushed the envelope on State action across what had previously been thought to be “inviolable” borders in the UN state system.
The group that took credit for the 9/11 attack was Al Qaeda, which interestingly came out of the eclectic Islamic troops from several countries in the Middle East – the Muhajadeen with one of their leaders being the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden – that were sponsored by the US during the Cold War 1980s to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. At the same time, the US had been supporting Iraq under Saddam Hussein in its decade long war against Iran, even though it had declared Iraq a “Terrorist State” back in the 1970s. But relations broke down after Iraq invaded Kuwait leading to the “First Gulf War” when the US attacked Iraq in 1990-1991.
The US became bogged down with militarised operations in the wide swathe of Islamic countries extending from North Africa, through the Middle East and into Afghanistan and Pakistan, into which the Muhajadeen returned after their battle-hardening experience in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda resented the US presence in Saudi Arabia, which is regarded as the “Holy Land” by Muslims.
Reacting to the attack of 9/11, George Bush launched the Second Gulf War in 2003 after he claimed Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction”. The subsequent collapse of the Iraqi State led to hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslim troops chafing under the rule of a Shia-dominated Government. These troops would become the core of ISIS, which would become even more radical against the West than Al Qaeda. And the War on Terror continued unabatedly.
For Guyanese, the post 9/11 impact has come out of the tightened security procedures instituted by the US through its new Homeland Security procedures and the insistence we comply with Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CTF) acts. Recently, there have been a number of Trinidadians that joined ISIS, but thankfully none from Guyana. Post 9/11 has led to a much more dangerous world.
