The United States is marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks today, honouring the victims while seeking to preserve the memory of a national trauma as the number of Americans who experienced the attacks first-hand continues to decline.
US President Donald Trump will attend a ceremony at the Pentagon rather than Ground Zero in New York, where the attacks on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers claimed the largest number of victims among the 2,977 people who died that day.
The New York Times reported that Trump chose not to attend the Ground Zero ceremony because presidents cannot deliver speeches there, with only victims’ family members addressing the gathering. Trump rejected that explanation, saying the newspaper had “invented” the reason.
Vice President JD Vance will attend the Manhattan ceremony, alongside the four living former presidents: Democrats Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and Republican George W. Bush, who occupied the White House when the attacks took place.
Nearly 100 million Americans today “had not yet been born or were too young to remember” the events, said Beth Hillman, president of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
Younger generations want to learn
After years of focusing primarily on preserving the memory of September 11, the museum now places greater emphasis on educating younger generations.
The institution uses trained eyewitnesses to recount their experiences to people who know the attacks mainly through their parents’ stories or school lessons.
“Even for those who weren’t there but had been born at the time, it is much easier to understand the scale of what happened this way. For the next generation, it is more complicated,” said 32-year-old Logan Miller, who lost his uncle and grandfather in the attacks.
Miller is among numerous volunteers who share their experiences with visitors at the museum, which attracts around 2.4 million people each year, as well as through recorded videos.
He said younger people show greater curiosity and ask more questions than older visitors, who sometimes hesitate to ask survivors about their experiences because they fear reopening painful memories.
“I wasn’t born then, but I think it is important to be here and make this journey,” said 22-year-old Chilean visitor Ignacio Gaete. He said his father remembers the day clearly and what he was doing at the time, adding that history must pass from one generation to the next.
Holly Kafka, 61, from Chicago, said young people now live at the fast pace of social media and need opportunities to stop and experience history in person.
More than 9,400 later deaths linked to illnesses
As they do each year, relatives of the victims gathered at Ground Zero from 8:40am local time to read the names of those who died.
Other ceremonies are taking place across New York, while two enormous beams of light will rise from Lower Manhattan in the evening, symbolically recreating the Twin Towers.
Beyond the nearly 3,000 people who died on September 11, more than 9,400 people have since died from illnesses linked to exposure to hazardous substances following the attacks, according to the federal programme monitoring the health of thousands of people affected by the disaster.
On September 11, 2001, 19 Al-Qaeda members, 15 of them from Saudi Arabia, hijacked four passenger aircraft. They crashed two into the World Trade Center towers and a third into the Pentagon.
The fourth aircraft, believed to have been heading towards the US Capitol or the White House, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers realised what was happening and attempted to storm the cockpit.
The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, overthrew the Taliban and pursued Al-Qaeda. In December, coalition forces, supported by Afghan anti-Taliban fighters, attacked and destroyed an Al-Qaeda base in the Tora Bora mountains.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden escaped and remained in hiding for almost a decade. US special forces located and killed him in 2011 at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has described himself as the “mastermind” of the September 11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan in 2003. According to a transcript of his interrogation released by the Pentagon in 2007, he said he had planned the attacks from beginning to end.
Mohammed has spent more than 20 years in Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. His trial, alongside three co-defendants, has recently been scheduled for June 2028.
Bin Laden’s successor as Al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, died in a US drone strike in Kabul in 2022. Egyptian national Saif al-Adel is currently believed to serve as the organisation’s de facto leader.
