Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta was an Egyptian terrorist hijacker and the ringleader of the September 11 attacks in which four United States commercial aircraft were commandeered with the intention of destroying specific civilian, military, and governmental targets. He was the hijacker-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 which he crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center as part of the coordinated attacks. At 33 years of age, he was the oldest of the 19 hijackers who took part in the attacks.
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, also transliterated as Usama bin Ladin, was a Saudi terrorist and founder of the Pan-Islamic militant organization al-Qaeda. The group is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and various countries. Under bin Laden's leadership, al-Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 attacks in the United States, and many other mass-casualty attacks worldwide.
The following timeline is a chronological list of all the major events leading up to, during, and immediately following the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001 timeline starts with the completion of the first World Trade Center tower in 1970 through the first anniversary of the attacks in 2002.
The hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men affiliated with the militant Islamist group al-Qaeda. They hailed from four countries; fifteen of them were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one from Egypt. To carry out the attacks, the hijackers were organized into four teams, each led by a pilot-trained hijacker who would commandeer the flight with three or four "muscle hijackers" who were trained to help subdue the pilots, passengers, and crew. Each team was assigned to a different flight and given a unique target to crash their respective planes into.
This article summarizes the events in the remaining days of September 2001 following the September 11 attacks which relate to the attacks. All times, except where otherwise noted, are in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), or UTC−04:00.
Ziad Samir Jarrah was a Lebanese terrorist and one of the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. He was the hijacker-pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, crashing the plane into a field in a rural area near Shanksville, Pennsylvania—after a passenger uprising—as part of the coordinated attacks.
The September 11 attacks of 2001, in addition to being a unique act of terrorism, constituted a media event on a scale not seen since the advent of civilian global satellite links. Instant worldwide reaction and debate were made possible by round-the-clock television news organizations and by the internet. As a result, most of the events listed below were known by a large portion of the world's population as they occurred.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a Pakistani Islamist militant held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under terrorism-related charges. He was named as "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks" in the 9/11 Commission Report.
The following lists events that happened during 2001 in Afghanistan.
Richard Alan Clarke is an American national security expert, novelist, and former government official. He served as the Counterterrorism Czar as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism for the United States between 1998 and 2003.
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (ISBN 0-7432-6823-7) is a 2004 award-winning book by former U.S. chief counter-terrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, criticizing past and present presidential administrations for the way they handled the War on Terrorism. The book focused much of its criticism on President George W. Bush, charging that he failed to take sufficient action to protect the country in the elevated-threat period before the September 11 attacks and for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Clarke feels greatly hampered the War on Terrorism. The book's title comes from the oath of office taken by all U.S. federal officials, in which they promise to defend the Constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."
The Bin Laden family, also spelled Bin Ladin, is a wealthy family intimately connected with the innermost circles of the Saudi royal family. It is the namesake and controlling shareholder of Saudi Binladin Group, a multinational construction firm. The family became the subject of media attention and scrutiny through the activities of one of its members, Osama bin Laden, the former head of the terrorist group al-Qaeda, who is responsible for the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on U.S. government and commercial buildings.
On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorist hijackers took control of four commercial aircraft and used them as suicide weapons in a series of four coordinated acts of terrorism to strike the World Trade Center in New York City, The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and an additional target in Washington, D.C. Two aircraft hit the World Trade Center while the third hit the Pentagon. A fourth plane did not arrive at its target, but crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after a passenger revolt. The intended target is believed to have been the United States Capitol. As a result, 2,977 victims were killed, making it the deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil, exceeding Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, which killed 2,335 members of the United States Armed Forces and 68 civilians. The effort was carefully planned by al-Qaeda, which sent 19 terrorists to take over Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 aircraft, operated by American Airlines and United Airlines.
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were a series of four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by the militant Islamic extremist network al-Qaeda against the United States. On the morning of Tuesday September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners mid-flight while traveling from the northeastern U.S. to California. The attackers were organized into three groups of five members and one group of four, with each group having one designated flight-trained hijacker who took control of the aircraft. Their goal was to crash the planes into prominent American buildings, inflicting mass casualties and major structural damage. The hijackers successfully crashed the first two planes into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, and the third plane into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane was intended to hit a federal government building in Washington, D.C., but instead crashed down outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania following a passenger revolt that foiled the attack. The four attacks killed a total of nearly 3,000 people and injured about 25,000 more.
The Battle of Tora Bora was a military engagement that took place in the cave complex of Tora Bora, eastern Afghanistan, from December 6–17, 2001, during the opening stages of the United States invasion of Afghanistan. It was launched by the United States and its allies with the objective to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of the militant organization al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda and bin Laden were suspected of being responsible for the September 11 attacks three months prior. Tora Bora is located in the White Mountains near the Khyber Pass. The U.S. stated that al-Qaeda had its headquarters there and that it was Bin Laden's location at the time.
Osama bin Laden, the founder and first leader of the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, shortly after 1:00 a.m. PKT by United States Navy SEALs of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group. The operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was carried out in a CIA-led operation with Joint Special Operations Command, commonly known as JSOC, coordinating the Special Mission Units involved in the raid. In addition to SEAL Team Six, participating units under JSOC included the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne)—also known as "Night Stalkers"—and operators from the CIA's Special Activities Division, which recruits heavily from former JSOC Special Mission Units. The operation ended a nearly 10-year search for bin Laden, following his role in the September 11 attacks on the United States.
The Bin Laden Issue Station, also known as Alec Station, was a standalone unit of the Central Intelligence Agency in operation from 1996 to 2005 dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates, both before and after the 9/11 attacks. It was headed initially by CIA analyst Michael Scheuer and later by Richard Blee and others.
At around 9:30 pm on September 11, 2001, George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) told the president and U.S. senior officials inside the bunker underneath the White House that the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had determined that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were behind the September 11 attacks. Two weeks after 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation connected the hijackers to al-Qaeda, a militant Salafist Islamist multi-national organization. In a number of video, audio, interview and printed statements, senior members of al-Qaeda have also asserted responsibility for organizing the September 11 attacks.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the September 11 attacks and their consequences:
Mohammed Atef was the military chief of al-Qaeda, and was considered one of Osama bin Laden's two deputies, the other being Ayman Al Zawahiri, although Atef's role in the organization was not well known by intelligence agencies for years. He was killed in a US airstrike in November 2001.
