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The Terrorist Attack Of The Middle East At The Time Essay

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On September 11th, 2001, The United States of America fell victim to the most deadly terrorist attack in modern history. Multiple Islamic terrorists flew United Flights 175 and 93, and American Flights 11 and 77, filled with hundreds of passengers, into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and into a field in Pennsylvania (Kean and Hamilton 1-2, 4). The death toll was in the thousands, and the attack sparked the international War on Terror. Many questions have been raised throughout the years about the attack, the most essential being: How did this group of terrorists manage to strike the United States at its core and create a day that will forever be remembered in the minds of the American people? One can begin to answer this question by looking at the background of Islam in the Middle East at the time. In 1998, Usama Bin Laden (UBL) and radical Egyptian, Ayman al Zawahiri, proclaimed a fatwa, calling on all Muslims to kill Americans wherever they may find them throughout the world (Kean and Hamilton 47). According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a fatwa is “a legal opinion or decree handed down by an Islamic religious leader.” UBL and many other radical Muslims believed that America had aggrieved Muslims throughout the Middle East through their intervention in countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia. This decree sparked a radical Islamist insurgency throughout the world to destroy western culture. According to CNN, fifteen out of the nineteen hijackers on the

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