NEW YORK — Americans solemnly marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, remembering the deadliest terror attack on US soil just weeks after the fraught end of the Afghanistan war that followed.
With a tolling bell and a moment of silence, the anniversary ceremony at ground zero in New York began exactly two decades after the attack started with the first of four hijacked planes crashing into one of the World Trade Centre’s twin towers.
“It felt like an evil specter had descended on our world, but it was also a time when many people acted above and beyond the ordinary,” said Mike Low, whose daughter, Sara Low, was a flight attendant on that plane.
Her family has “known unbearable sorrow and disbelief” in the years since, the father told a crowd that included President Joe Biden and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, AP reported.
But “as we carry these 20 years forward, I find sustenance in a continuing appreciation for all of those who rose to be more than ordinary people,” Low said.
Biden was also scheduled to pay respects at the two other sites where the 9/11 conspirators crashed the jets: the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Together, the attacks killed nearly 3,000 people.
The anniversary unfolded under the pall of a pandemic and in the shadow of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, now ruled by the same militants who gave safe haven to the 9/11 plotters.
“It’s hard because you hoped that this would just be a different time and a different world. But sometimes history starts to repeat itself and not in the best of ways,” said Thea Trinidad, who lost her father in the attacks and read victims’ names at the ceremony at ground zero in New York.
In a video released Friday night, Biden mourned the ongoing losses of 9/11.
“Children have grown up without parents, and parents have suffered without children,” said Biden, a childhood friend of the father of a Sept. 11 victim, Davis Grier Sezna Jr.
But the president also spotlighted what he called the “central lesson” of Sept. 11: “that at our most vulnerable … unity is our greatest strength.”
Former President George W. Bush, the nation’s leader on 9/11, is due at the Pennsylvania memorial. The only other post-9/11 US president, Donald Trump, plans to be in New York, in addition to providing commentary at a boxing match in Florida in the evening.
Other observances — from a wreath-laying in Portland, Maine, to a fire engine parade in Guam — are planned across a country now full of 9/11 plaques, statues and commemorative gardens.
