15 Years After 9-11 Terrorist Attacks....Lessons For World Peace And Security
The 9-11 Terrorist Attacks was a series of well-coordinated terrorist attacks perpetrated against the United States of America within the country’s air space and land territory by members of the Jihadist terrorist group known as Al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001.
The terrorist attack is widely called “9-11” because, as earlier stated, it occurred on a September which is the 9th month of the year while the fact also remains that it occurred on the 11th day of the month. Apart from USA, 115 other countries lost citizens in the September 11 Attacks and the terrorist act has been declared as the worst terrorist attack in world history.
Prelude to 9-11 Terrorist Attacks
The origins of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda that launched the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks started in 1979 when Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with 100,000 Soviet soldiers to support the grossly-unpopular (within Afghanistan) but pro-Soviet Union regime of Babrak Karmal. Armed rebellion against the government of Babrak Karmal and his Soviet Union backers soon followed and it (the armed rebellion) was championed by the Mujahedin rebels both from within Afghanistan and from other Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc. Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al-Qaeda and the grand planner of the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks, was a Saudi Arabian citizen when the Mujahedins (literally meaning “strugglers”) began their armed rebellion against Soviet Union in Afghanistan but promptly travelled to Afghanistan to join the Mujahedin rebels and after some years formed his own group named Al-Qaeda in 1988.
Osama Bin Laden initially saw the United States of America as an ally because of America’s financial and material support for the Mujahedins of Afghanistan but by 1988 that he formed Al Qaeda, he was already seeing USA with disdain because of the country’s support for Israel and other moderate Arab countries. His hatred for USA became open in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Osama Bin Laden offered the services of his Al-Qaeda militants to the authorities of Saudi Arabia to defend the country against any would-be Saddam Hussein’s invasion but the Saudi Arabia authorities ignored him and instead signed a pact with the USA for protection. His subsequent open denouncement of Saudi Arabia for this arrangement would later make Saudi Arabia expel him from the country and revoke his Saudi Arabian citizenship; his extended family also chose to disown him at this period.
Fleeing to Sudan with his 3 wives and 10 children, bin Laden started using his Al-Qaeda terrorist network to launch series of small-scale but yet very deadly terrorist attacks on United States of America’s interest across the world. The first of those terrorist attacks was the 1993 World Trade Centre Car Bombing in which a truck loaded with high explosives was parked under the World Trade Centre North Tower and detonated with the intention of not only collapsing the North Tower but also for the collapsing North Tower to fall on the World Trade Center South Tower and thereby kill thousands of people. The car bomb exploded as planned but did not collapse the towers though it managed to kill 6 people and injured more than 1,000 others. Even though United States of America’s security agents were able to identify, arrest, detain, prosecute and sentence most of the Al-Qaeda members that perpetrated this dastardly act, other equally deadly and dastardly terrorist acts against USA interests by bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda soon followed. 5 United States soldiers were killed and several others wounded when Al-Qaeda terrorist detonated a car bomb near a United States military base in Saudi Arabia in 1995 ; another 19 United States soldiers were killed and 372 others were wounded when Al-Qaeda terrorists detonated another car bomb targeting a United States military complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996 ; 224 people (including many Americans) died and more than 4,000 others seriously injured when 2 car bombs were simultaneously detonated by bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorists near each of the United States of America’s embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and 19 United States Navy officers were killed when bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorists bombed a United States Navy destroyer ship refueling at Yemen in 2000.
Under intense pressure from USA and Saudi Arabia, the Sudanese government expelled Osama Bin Laden from Sudan in 1998, an act which made him relocate to Afghanistan where he became even more opportuned to expand and improve on his terrorist capabilities either in the direction of training new Al-Qaeda members or funding the operations of already-trained Al-Qaeda terrorists. Despite his numerous terrorist activities mostly directed at United States targets in different parts of the world, no concerted effort was made by the United States security agencies to apprehend or even neutralize this brain behind Al-Qaeda’s many nefarious terrorist activities so much so that on February 2001 (seven months before actualizing 9-11), Osama bin Laden held an open wedding for his son in Afghanistan and openly boasted of how he would soon kill many more Americans.
The 9-11 Terrorist Attacks
Self-assured that United States of America’s internal security system is far from being perfect, leader of Al-Qaeda terrorist group Osama bin Laden devised a grand terrorism plan that would not only kill thousands of Americans but that would kill the thousands of Americans on their own soil. 19 terrorists trained in Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan (and who all personally received individual instructions from Osama bin Laden) took control of 4 large American passenger planes on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 and flew a plane each into the 2 towers of the World Trade Centre Complex in New York City, New York, USA; flew another plane into the Pentagon Military complex in Arlington, Virginia, USA; and crashed the 4th plane into a field in Stone Creek Township, Pennsylvania, USA on their way to flying it into the White House in Washington D.C, USA. These coordinated four-pronged terrorist attacks immediately led to the death of 2996 persons, a number which include the 19 terrorists and 2977 victims of the terrorist act.
Apart from this high death toll, USA’s losses due to property damage and lost production of goods and services was tagged at 2 trillion U.S dollars though another source gave the value of the country’s losses as 3.3 trillion U.S dollars, an amount that was equivalent to one-fifth of the national debt of the country. Furthermore, the dust and fire generated from the exploded planes and the collapsed buildings created millions of tonnes of toxic fumes (comprising of more than 2500 contaminants that included 400 tones of asbestos, 90,000 tones of jet fuel containing benzene, mercury from more than 500,000 fluorescent tubes, 200,000 pounds of lead and cadmium from computers, crystalline silica from 420,000 tons of concrete, plasterboard and glass, and up to 2 million pounds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from diesel-fueled fires) that later caused serious health problems like nose bleeds, hacking coughs, lung cancer, chronic asthma, kidney failures, liver cancer, heart diseases and nervous system damage for thousands of emergency-response workers, journalists, and bystanders present at the vicinity of the cataclysm and it has been officially stated that the number of people that will die from illnesses relating to 9-11 Terrorist Attacks will be more than the number of people that died during the attacks because 37,000 people are officially recognized as sick due to the attacks and more than 1,000 of these have died from their illness. In addition to these, it was been officially declared that a total of 116 countries lost citizens in the attacks as many as 3,000 little children became orphans due to attacks, and the attack is till date the worst terrorist attack in world history even though the initial plan of the bin Laden-trained terrorists was to attack nuclear facilities in USA, an act which would have caused far greater number of deaths.
About a month after the atrocity in 2001, the Republican Party member George W. Bush-led United States Government launched an armed invasion against the Taliban regime of Afghanistan due to the regime’s refusal to hand over Osama Bin Laden it openly declared it was harbouring to the United States security agencies for prosecution for his role in the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks. The Taliban regime was successfully deposed, Osama bin Laden initially escaped capture but was eventually discovered in Pakistan almost a decade later in 2011 and promptly killed.
Lessons for World Peace And Security 15 Years After 9-11
The 9-11 Terrorist Attacks taught the world 5 important lessons in the area of peace and security and these are (1) no country should underestimate the capabilities of terrorists no matter how few or how many they are (it took just 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists to kill thousands of people, injure thousands more, destroy properties worth trillions of dollars and cause the sicknesses of tens of thousands of people with 9-11 Attacks) (2) every country should take the bull by the horns by always carrying the fight to the terrorists but not vice versa and endeavoring to neutralize the terrorists overtly or covertly when they are still fresh (3) every country in the world should accept the fact that religious terrorism is an international reality and that it poses deadly threats to all and sundry so governments should stop playing politics with terrorism (4) every country should make anti-terrorism laws contain very stiff penalties and also enforce such laws with vigour and fervor (5) every country in the world should create an educational program that will teach the general public the dangers and threats terrorism that poses to the world so as to dissuade people (especially the young ones) from being lured into terrorism; the educational program should also enlighten the general public to the fact that terrorists target the defenceless general public for atrocities more than heavily-guarded political office holders and wealthy individuals so the general public should be consciously encouraged to report suspicious individuals and activities to the authorities.
15 years after the 9-11 Attacks, the wisdom in these 5 lessons have been proved many times over because the world is yet to be safe from terrorists despite all the efforts of the world countries on Global War On Terror mainly due to the fact that many countries are yet to learn from the 5 lessons stated above. An example of this was the political ignorance of U.S President Obama that made him devise alternative means of removing Muammar Ghaddafi as ruler of Libya in 2011 by supplying large quantities of weapons to anti-Ghaddafi rebels (many of whom were trained Al-Qaeda members and many of whom Ghaddafi had initially prosecuted and jailed) under the confused and deluded reasoning that he (Obama) was bringing democracy to Libya. The rebels truly succeeded in ousting and killing Ghaddafi but they (the rebels) also quickly turned their U.S-supplied weapons on all United States personnel and properties in Libya and even succeeded in killing U.S Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and some other top U.S diplomats and security agents based in Libya.
Other examples to prove that the leadership of many world countries learnt no lessons from the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks include the way the naïve Obama caused the formation and strengthening of the ISIS Terrorist Group by rushing U.S soldiers out of Iraq and destabilizing Libya with his removal of its ruler Ghaddafi and consciously or unconsciously paved the way for ISIS terrorist group to become the richest, deadliest and most widespread terrorist group in the world; the way Belgian security agencies failed to stop the very preventable twin bombings that occurred in Brussels, Belgium in March 2016; the way Indonesia woefully failed to prevent the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group from bombing hundreds of people to death in Indonesia in 2002; the way the United Kingdom security agencies blatantly failed to prevent dozens of people from being bombed to death by Al Qaeda-inspired suicide bombers in London, U.K in 2005; the way the security agencies of Spain unequivocally failed to prevent almost 200 people from being killed in multiple train bombings by Al Qaeda-trained terrorists in Madrid, Spain in 2005; the way the clueless, shoeless, ex-President Jonathan deliberately played politics with the Al Qaeda-linked Boko Haram terrorist group in Nigeria by not only refusing to deal Boko Haram a decisive blow when the group was just growing wings but also by the compunctionless diversion of the 2.1 billion U.S dollars offcially approved to be used to buy arms and ammunition for the Nigerian armed forces to tackle Boko Haram into his (Jonathan’s) re-election campaign fund bu some of his cronies, the end-result being the seemingly-endless large-scale Boko Haram bombings, shootings, beheadings, and death-stonings of tens of thousands of Nigerians and the concomitant kidnappings, sexual slavery, labour slavery, forced recruitments, and massive internal and external displacement of millions of Nigerians old and young, man and woman; the way the security agencies of India clearly failed to prevent the 3-day-long bombings and shootings to death of 157 people (and the infliction of serious wounds on more than 600 others) by the jihadist Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in Mumbai, India in 2008; the way the security agencies of France hopelessly failed to prevent the bombings and shooting to death of 130 people (and the infliction of serious wounds on 368 others) by the jihadist ISIL terrorist group in France in 2015; etc
Conclusion
15 years after 9-11 Terrorist Attacks, a lot of lessons to ensure world peace and security could be readily learnt but many post 9-11 terrorist activities in various world countries in the past 15 years showed that the leadership of world countries (except Israel, Russia, China, Australia, and Canada) learnt no lessons at all from the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks. This is why peace and security have continued to be a sort of metaphorical mirage almost throughout the world 15 years after 9-11 Terrorist Attacks