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A sequential look at United Flight 175 crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center

The September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of suicide attacks against the United States conducted on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. According to the official 9/11 Commission Report, nineteen men affiliated with Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, a loose network of Sunni Islamist terrorists, simultaneously hijacked four U.S. domestic commercial airliners. Two were crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York City — one into each of the two tallest towers, about 18 minutes apart — shortly after which both towers collapsed. The third aircraft crashed into the U.S. Department of Defense headquarters, the Pentagon, in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed into a rural field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, 80 miles (129 km) east of Pittsburgh, following passenger resistance. The official count records 2,986 deaths in the attacks.

The 9/11 Commission reported that these attackers turned the hijacked planes into the largest suicide bombs in history in one of the most lethal acts ever carried out in the United States. The September 11th attacks are among the most significant events to have occurred so far in the 21st century in terms of the profound economic, social, political, cultural and military effects that followed in the United States and many other parts of the world.