On September 11, 2001, 19 men affiliated with al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners. Each team of hijackers included a trained pilot. Two planes crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, one plane into each tower. The pilot of the third team crashed a plane into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. Passengers and members of the flight crew on the fourth hijacked aircraft attempted to retake control of their plane from the hijackers; that plane crashed into a field in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania. A total of 2,976 people died in these attacks.
According to official U.S. government sources, the September 11th attacks were consistent with the mission statement of al-Qaeda. The overarching motivation for the present al-Qaeda campaign was set out in a 1998 fatwa issued by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu-Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha, Shaykh Mir Hamzah, and Fazlur Rahman. In consequence the Bush administration declared a "war on terrorism," with the stated goals of bringing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to justice and preventing the emergence of other terrorist networks.
Web Sites
- September 11, 2001
- The GMU Digital Archive
- The world's newspapers from September 11 and 12, 2001
- A memorial from CNN
- Research Guide: Terrorism
Catalog
Search the library's catalog for September 11.
Databases
Enter the phrase, 9/11 or September 11 in these databases: