From Afghanistan to Iraq: The World Shaped by 25 Years of 9/11

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States is again remembering nearly 3,000 people killed in a single morning that transformed American security policy, launched decades of war and produced geopolitical consequences stretching from Afghanistan and Iraq to the Kurdistan Region.

Americans on Friday marked the quarter-century anniversary with ceremonies at the World Trade Center site in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania.

Associated Press reporter Jennifer Peltz reported that President Donald Trump was expected to attend the Pentagon observance, while Vice President JD Vance was due at the National September 11 Memorial in New York.

For the first time, the New York ceremony was also set to include a moment of silence for people who later died from cancers and other illnesses associated with exposure to toxic dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

The passage of 25 years has not diminished the historical weight of the attacks.

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial aircraft.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center's North Tower. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m.

At 10:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew fought the hijackers.

The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m.; the North Tower fell at 10:28 a.m.

In total, 2,977 victims were killed, excluding the 19 hijackers.

The FBI determined that all 19 attackers had been trained by al-Qaeda. Fifteen were Saudi nationals, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was Egyptian and one Lebanese.

The bipartisan 9/11 Commission later concluded that al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden and operating from sanctuary in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, organized the attacks.

From September 11 to the 'War on Terror'

Washington's response transformed both American institutions and its role abroad.

Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force days after the attacks, giving the president broad authority to use force against those responsible for Sept. 11 and those who harbored them.

NATO invoked Article 5, its collective-defense clause, for the first time in the alliance's history.

The USA PATRIOT Act expanded federal investigative and surveillance powers, while the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Department of Homeland Security by consolidating 22 agencies and offices.

Airport security, intelligence sharing, financial monitoring and counterterrorism became enduring parts of government policy.

Those changes also created persistent arguments over the balance between national security and civil liberties, including surveillance, detention, profiling and privacy.

Peltz noted in her AP report that 9/11 also produced mistrust, prejudice and hate crimes against Muslims, even as Muslim Americans subsequently became increasingly visible in political and civic life.

The first major military response came in Afghanistan.

The United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom on Oct. 7, 2001, working with Afghan opponents of the Taliban to overthrow the government sheltering al-Qaeda.

The Taliban fell from power within weeks, but what began as a counterterrorism campaign developed into a 20-year military, counterinsurgency and state-building effort.

The cycle eventually came almost full circle.

The Taliban returned to Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021, and the final U.S. withdrawal was completed later that month.

The path from Sept. 11 to Iraq was different, and the distinction remains essential.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not found responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

The 9/11 Commission later concluded that contacts between Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda had not developed into a collaborative operational relationship and found no evidence that Baghdad had cooperated with al-Qaeda in carrying out attacks against the United States.

But Sept. 11 profoundly changed the political and strategic environment in which Washington assessed Iraq.

That shift can be seen in an October 2001 PBS FRONTLINE interview with analyst Laurie Mylroie, an advocate of the view that Saddam Hussein's government had played a wider role in international terrorism.

Mylroie described an intense argument inside Washington only weeks after Sept. 11.

According to her account, Pentagon figures were pushing for Iraq to become a central target in the broader war on terrorism, while the State Department warned that widening the campaign beyond al-Qaeda and Afghanistan could fracture the international coalition.

She also described the CIA as viewing the available evidence as pointing overwhelmingly toward bin Laden rather than Iraq.

Mylroie herself argued that Iraqi intelligence had been involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and suggested that Iraq might have been linked to later terrorist plots.

Those claims were influential in some policy circles at the time but remained highly disputed and were not substantiated by the later official investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Her interview is nevertheless important as a record of how rapidly the question of Iraq entered Washington's post-9/11 strategic debate.

The Bush administration increasingly framed Saddam's government through a broader post-9/11 concept of potentially catastrophic threats, combining concerns over hostile states, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The administration's 2002 National Security Strategy argued that the United States could not always wait for threats to become imminent before acting.

Congress separately authorized force against Iraq in October 2002, and the U.S.-led liberation began in March 2003.

Iraq, ISIS and a New Regional Order

The removal of Saddam Hussein changed the Middle East far beyond the original objectives of the military operation.

Iraq entered years of insurgency, political instability and sectarian warfare.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's organization became al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2004. It later evolved through the Islamic State of Iraq into the organization that became ISIS.

By 2014, ISIS had seized large territories across Iraq and Syria before eventually losing most of its territorial holdings to Iraqi, Kurdish and international forces.

One of the paradoxes of the post-9/11 era was therefore that a war fought within the wider American "War on Terror" helped create the political and security environment in which another generation of jihadist organization expanded dramatically.

For Kurds, however, the post-2003 transformation produced a very different outcome.

Kurdish self-government did not begin with Sept. 11 or the Iraq liberation.

After the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad lost effective control over much of the Kurdish territories, while the U.S.-led no-fly zone helped protect the area from renewed Iraqi military intervention.

Kurdish parties established a regional parliament and administration in 1992.

What changed after 2003 was the constitutional and geopolitical status of that existing autonomy.

During the Operation Iraqi Freedom, U.S. special operations forces worked alongside Peshmerga units on Iraq's northern front.

The political settlement that followed Saddam's fall then converted Kurdish de facto autonomy into formally recognized federal status.

The 2004 Transitional Administrative Law recognized the Kurdistan Regional Government, and Article 117 of Iraq's 2005 Constitution recognized the Kurdistan Region and its existing authorities as a federal region.

Kurdish political influence in Baghdad also increased dramatically. Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leader Jalal Talabani became president of Iraq in 2005 and remained in office until 2014.

Yet the same post-2003 order left major disputes unresolved.

Kirkuk and other Kurdistani territories remained subject to Article 140, whose planned normalization, census and referendum process was never completed.

Questions over oil, revenue, federal authority, territory and the powers of the Kurdistan Region became enduring points of contention between Erbil and Baghdad.

The rise of ISIS further transformed Kurdish relations with Washington.

When Iraqi forces collapsed across parts of northern Iraq in 2014, Peshmerga forces entered several disputed areas and became a central partner of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.

That partnership strengthened the international profile of the Kurdistan Region.

But Kurdish territorial gains were partly reversed after the 2017 independence referendum, when federal forces reasserted control over Kirkuk and other Kurdistani areas.

The relationship between Sept. 11 and Kurdish political development must therefore be described carefully.

Sept. 11 transformed U.S. foreign policy. That transformation helped create the strategic circumstances in which Washington later chose to invade Iraq, destroying the Baathist order and giving Kurdish leaders an unprecedented opportunity to turn an already existing autonomous administration into constitutionally recognized federal power.

That settlement strengthened Kurdish institutions while simultaneously embedding disputes that continue more than two decades later.

A Legacy Still Unfinished

The legal aftermath of Sept. 11 itself also remains unresolved.

as detailed in a previous Kurdistan24 report in August, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), accused by the United States of masterminding the attacks, is now scheduled to go on trial at Guantanamo Bay on June 5, 2028.

KSM was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.

Years of pretrial proceedings have centered partly on the military commissions system and the CIA's treatment of detainees in secret prisons.

A 2014 U.S. Senate report documented that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times.

The fact that his trial is scheduled to begin nearly 27 years after the attacks illustrates how some of the most difficult legal questions produced by the post-9/11 response remain unsettled.

Read More: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 9/11 Trial Set for June 2028

Twenty-five years later, Sept. 11 therefore belongs simultaneously to memory and to contemporary politics.

It remains a story of nearly 3,000 individual lives lost, but also of wars, institutions, alliances, surveillance powers, political realignments and unresolved arguments over how states should respond to terrorism.

In Afghanistan, it began America's longest war.

In Iraq, it changed the strategic climate in which Washington chose regime change.

For the Kurds, the resulting transformation of Iraq helped turn an already established autonomous administration into a constitutionally recognized federal region.

The attacks lasted less than two hours.

Their political consequences have lasted a quarter of a century, and many remain unfinished.