This event ignited the ongoing Global War on Terror.
Over two decades have elapsed since four commercial flights carrying 19 hijackers were forced to abort, and the planes crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., the Twin Towers in New York City, and an empty field in Pennsylvania. The passengers on United Airlines flight 93 had stopped what appeared to be an attempt to bomb the White House or the U.S. Capitol.
Osama bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda, devised the scheme, which resulted in 2,977 fatalities in what is still the biggest terrorist strike in history 23 years ago.
Experts caution that the threat posed by extremist groups is still very real today, even in light of the conclusion of the American war in Afghanistan and the official defeat of Islamic terrorist groups like the Islamic State and al Qaeda.
The impacts of terrorism over the previous year were examined in the Institute for Economics & Peace’s 2024 Global Terrorism Index, which was published in February. It was discovered that terrorist-related deaths had climbed by 22% from 2022 to 2024 and “are now at their highest level since 2017.
