25 years since 9/11: Chronology of the war on terror

When the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York collapsed onto the asphalt and claimed nearly three thousand lives, a new geopolitical order began to be built. If today we are witnessing a gradual transformation of the world order, which is also disrupting old global structures, that was a clean cut, a turning point for the world that barely lasted two hours. The Bush Doctrine, which was promoted as a response, dealt the first major blow of demolition to international law, in the name of the so-called "war on terror." The strategy devised by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other neoconservative hawks surrounding George W. Bush imposed the concept of preventive war as a blank check for Western powers, basically the United States, to attack other countries unilaterally. A new type of war was then set in motion that was no longer between states but pitted governments against insurgent groups with international tentacles. And the era of surveillance also began, with state control over privacy in the name of national security.

In this quarter of a century, the jihadism that devised and perpetrated the 9/11 attacks has undergone a process of growth, reconstruction, atomization and reconversion, but even though it is considered defeated, it has not died out completely in the Middle East and is stronger than ever in African territory. And it still sees how the motives that Osama bin Laden brandished when he claimed authorship of 9/11, starting with the Palestinian cause and ending with imperialism in the Middle East, not only have not disappeared, but are rather reaching their peak, with the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the war initiated by Donald Trump in Iran.

Not even a month had passed since the attacks when, on October 7, 2001, the United States and a coalition of allies such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Spain, launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The attack quickly overthrew the Taliban regime, whom they accused of giving refuge to Osama bin Laden and hosting Al-Qaeda training camps. But what George W. Bush did not know then was that he was dragging his country into the longest war in its history and that it would end, after 20 years, with a more than shameful withdrawal from the country and a return to power of the Taliban, in August 2021.

After having overthrown the Taliban, Bush turned his sights toward Iraq, with whom the United States had been at odds since the first Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, another neighboring oil power. Bush claimed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, an argument that would later be proven totally false, and sought the support of the UN to attack the country, and when it refused, he launched his "preventive war" with the help of Tony Blair's United Kingdom and José María Aznar's Spain. The so-called "Azores trio" invaded Iraq, overthrew Saddam Hussein, and unleashed a long sectarian insurgency. A supposedly Iraqi court, but funded and overseen by Washington, tried and executed Saddam Hussein by hanging in 2006.

The Spanish government's participation in the Iraq War placed Madrid in the crosshairs of global jihadism. Early on the morning of March 11, 2004, three days before a general election, Al-Qaeda detonated four commuter trains in Madrid during rush hour, killing 193 people in the deadliest terrorist attack in Spain's history. The attempt by José María Aznar's government to blame ETA for fear of the repercussions it would have on the general election was immediately debunked. However, the PP's entrenchment in the theory of "two lines of investigation" further strengthened the opposition vote and cost the PP the government.

At the Cuban naval base that the United States had in Guantanamo, a prison for those accused of terrorism had already been created in early 2002 without any legal guarantee. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, has been held there since 2003, and just this year a trial date has been set for 2028. But in April 2004, a report on the program 60 Minutes on American television and in The New Yorker brought to light very graphic images of the torture and mistreatment that American soldiers inflicted on their prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The scandal was huge, but in 2005 it was further revealed, this time by the Washington Post and later ABC News, that the CIA had a network of prisons in various countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East where it systematically practiced torture methods such as waterboarding, facts that the agency finally admitted in 2008.

Four suicide bombers, radicalized British citizens, carried out the coordinated attack on three London Underground trains during rush hour, at 8:50 a.m., and shortly after on a bus. The attack was claimed by Al-Qaeda and left 52 dead and about seven hundred injured. A few days later, on July 23, the jihadist group perpetrated another attack in the tourist city of Sharm el-Sheikh, in Egypt, where it killed 88 people, mostly Egyptian citizens but also some foreigners.

In the early hours of May 2, 2011, soldiers from the elite US Navy SEAL unit raided the fortified residential compound where Osama bin Laden was hiding, in the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan. In a lightning operation that President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, followed live from the White House, the leader of Al-Qaeda was extrajudicially executed with a shot to the head. According to Obama's own version, after conducting DNA tests to confirm it was him, his body was thrown into the sea from an aircraft carrier that same morning. With his death, Ayman al-Zawahiri assumed the leadership of Al-Qaeda until July 31, 2022, when the United States military also killed him with a drone in Kabul.

In March 2011, within the framework of the Arab Spring, protests in Syria led to a civil war that would last nearly 14 years. Although the outbreak is not linked to the war on terror, the subsequent development of the conflict would become immersed in it, due to the presence in the country of groups such as Al-Nusra (a branch of Al-Qaeda) and the subsequent emergence of the Islamic State, which led to an international military intervention in the country. In Libya, the fall of dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, another consequence of the Arab Spring, also gave rise to international intervention through NATO and left the country plunged into chaos that jihadist groups have also taken advantage of to strengthen themselves.

The jihadist group Al-Shabab, born in Somalia at the beginning of the 21st century, pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2012 and extended its tentacles throughout the Horn of Africa and beyond. Although it had already committed some attacks, it then began its deadliest phase. Its attack on Garissa University, in Kenya, in 2015, when a group of terrorists entered the campus and fired indiscriminately at the students, left 148 dead and became the bloodiest in the history of Kenya. In October 2017, with a truck loaded with explosives, Al-Shabab killed more than 500 people in a commercial area of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The group remains active in the Horn of Africa and controls some parts of Somalia.

Born from a branch of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in 2013 the Islamic State expanded into Syria, taking advantage of the civil war, and became known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS, the acronym in English, or Daesh in the transliteration of the acronym in Arabic). But it was in 2014 when it proclaimed a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and called on Muslims to populate it. In just one year, in 2015, it already had 40,000 fighters and came to control a territory the size of the United Kingdom. But its great power lay in the ability to recruit militants in hundreds of countries and launch them to perpetrate deadly attacks in the name of the caliphate. Thousands of European citizens followed the IS call and went to fight in Syria, and others organized some of the deadliest attacks in the history of Europe.

Born around 2002 in Nigeria and initially linked to Al-Qaeda, the Islamist group Boko Haram pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015. The previous year, in 2014, it had already become world-famous with the notorious kidnapping of 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria. The case shocked the world and started the global campaign #BringBackOurGirls, but today the whereabouts of many of them are still unknown, although some managed to escape. Since then, Boko Haram has carried out similar mass kidnappings, which have become its modus operandi, apart from suicide attacks often perpetrated by coerced girls or young women. Its affiliation with the IS, however, split the group into factions that attack each other. Boko Haram is still a threat due to the great regional destabilization and the serious humanitarian crisis it generates, which pushes many people to migrate. France's military presence in the area failed to diminish the threat.

Catalonia was marked forever on August 17, 2017, when a van rammed into people walking along Las Ramblas and killed 17 people. Hours later, a second attack in Cambrils left another victim. The event that shocked Catalan society was the last in a series of attacks claimed by Daesh across Europe, which had begun with the attack on the Bataclan concert hall and other venues in Paris, in November 2015, with 130 deaths. The assault months earlier on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo had been claimed, on the other hand, by Al-Qaeda. In 2016, another Daesh attack on the metro and airport in Belgium left 35 dead, and months later 86 people died in the mass ramming of a truck into a crowd celebrating France's National Day in Nice.

A decade ago, therefore, the Islamic State had become the number 1 enemy of the West. The Obama administration launched various operations to combat it in Iraq and Syria through allied Kurdish militias. In 2018, the Kurds pushed back Daesh, which lost its capital, Raqqa, and also ceded Mosul, its stronghold in Iraq. The Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad recovered the periphery of Damascus and considered the war won. The total defeat of the feared Islamic State, however, came with the operation that killed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October 2019. Even so, beyond the actions of the so-called "lone wolves," who swore allegiance to IS without being truly linked to it, the latest Global Terrorism Index warns that IS is still the deadliest terrorist group in the world.

Donald Trump's first administration had already sought to leave Afghanistan and had negotiated an exit from the country with the Taliban, but it was the administration of Democrat Joe Biden that carried it out on August 30, 2021. However, that withdrawal became one of the lowest points of his presidency, when images of the chaotic departure of American planes from Kabul airbase went around the world. The United States and its allies evacuated 123,000 people from the country, but many others were desperate to leave. In a matter of days, the Taliban returned to power and re-established a radical Islamist regime that has banished women from public life.

In August 2022, after six decades of presence in West Africa, France withdrew from Mali and began its departure from the entire Sahel, which culminated in 2023. The social rejection of the former colonial power had grown to unsustainable levels and was behind the coups d'état that have imposed nationalist military juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, or Niger. Chad and Senegal have also been breaking ties with the supposed French "protector." The first three countries, moreover, have opted to turn to Russian cooperation, with Russian Wagner mercenaries establishing themselves across the continent. The expulsion of French soldiers, on the other hand, has been taken advantage of by IS and Al-Qaeda, which have turned this region into the epicenter of global jihadist terrorism.