US marks 25 years since 9/11 with ceremonies honoring 2,977 victims and long-term casualties

Twenty-five years after four hijacked commercial airliners became weapons against the United States, the country paused on Friday to reckon with what that day had taken and what it had set in motion. Ceremonies unfolded at the three sites where the attacks occurred—New York City, Washington DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania—each one a place where the nation's sense of itself had fractured on a single morning in 2001.

In New York, where al-Qaeda operatives flew two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the main observance drew current and former presidents, governors, and family members who read aloud the names of the 2,977 people killed that day. The ceremony included wreath layings, vigils, and moments of silence timed to the moments of impact and collapse. But this year's remembrance carried a weight that extended beyond those who died in the immediate aftermath. The ceremony also acknowledged more than 600 firefighters who had succumbed to illnesses caused by the toxic air and dust that poured from the burning structures. New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani, a Muslim Democrat whose very presence at the ceremony had drawn Republican objection, attended to honor the dead and the years of suffering that followed.

The toxicity that officials had downplayed for decades became impossible to ignore. In the months after the attacks, as asbestos and toxic smoke blanketed the city, government leaders assured residents and cleanup workers that the air was safe to breathe. It was not. A federal medical monitoring program has since documented at least 9,400 additional deaths attributable to exposure to the dust, rubble, and fumes of burning plastic and metal. This week, Mamdani released tens of thousands of documents that revealed how thoroughly officials had concealed the true hazard from the public. The long shadow of 9/11 extended far beyond the immediate death toll.

At the Pentagon in Washington, President Donald Trump spoke at a ceremony marking the attack on that symbol of American military power. In his remarks, he connected the commemoration to his current military actions, stating that the nation would never forget 9/11, which was why the country continued to fight today. Other administration officials traveled to the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where passengers and crew members had rushed the cockpit of a hijacked United Airlines jet, forcing the plane down in an empty field and preventing the attackers from reaching their final target, the US Capitol.

The ripples from that single day had reshaped the world in ways both visible and invisible. The attacks triggered the Bush administration's War on Terror, drawing the United States into its longest military conflict in Afghanistan and, more controversially, into an invasion of Iraq that had no connection to 9/11. The wars that followed have cost billions of dollars and claimed countless lives. The damage to American credibility proved harder to quantify but no less real. Policies including extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation at secret CIA prisons, and the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay had corroded the international goodwill that had flowed toward the United States in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

The attacks had also transformed the machinery of American governance and daily life. The Department of Homeland Security emerged as one of the largest federal agencies. Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the USA Patriot Act, expanding the government's power to monitor its own citizens. Airport security became unrecognizable. And the nation's relationship with its Muslim population fractured in ways that took decades to begin healing.

European Union and NATO allies marked the anniversary with their own tributes. European Council President Antonio Costa expressed admiration for the victims, their families, and those who had rushed to help. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte noted that the alliance had invoked Article 5—collective defense—for the first and only time in its history in response to the attacks. The solidarity that had bound democracies together in that moment had frayed over the years, particularly as the United States pursued wars that many allies questioned and as American leaders grew skeptical of the alliances themselves.

Mamdani's attendance at the New York ceremony represented something the nation had struggled toward: the recognition that Muslims were also victims of 9/11 and its aftermath, and that honoring the dead meant honoring all those who had suffered in the years since. His decision to release the hidden documents about the toxicity of Ground Zero suggested that the work of reckoning with 9/11 was far from finished. The attacks had killed nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. The years that followed had claimed thousands more, and the full accounting of what that day had cost—in lives, in trust, in the shape of the world itself—was still being written.