The United States on Monday marked the 22nd anniversary of the Sept.11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,<> people and flattened the so-called World Trade Center in New York City.
US President Joe Biden is scheduled to participate in events organized to commemorate the anniversary and attend a ceremony at a military base in Alaska.
Americans are recalling the attacks that changed "the course of the country's history," as President Biden put it, by gathering at the places targeted by the attacks, fire stations, the memorial to the victims, the site of the two World Trade Towers in New York City destroyed in the attacks and the September 11 Museum in the southern part of the Manhattan borough of New York as well.
Unusually, this year's commemoration will not include official speeches at the ceremony at the Memorial to the Victims of the Attacks, which will feature Vice President Kamala Harris, and the keynote speakers will be relatives of the victims.
Identification of two victims
More than two decades after the deadly attacks, US authorities announced on Sunday the identification of two victims of those attacks, using advanced DNA analysis technology.
Authorities said the victims, a man and a woman, were killed when the towers collapsed at the World Trade Center in New York, but declined to identify them at the request of their families.
This brings the number of identified victims to 1649,2753 out of <>,<> people killed in the collapse of the New York World Trade Towers.
Attacks destroyed New York's World Trade Center towers (social media)
A total of 2977,<> people were killed in those attacks, claimed by al-Qaeda, with two planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers in New York, a third plane hitting the Pentagon, and the fourth — apparently targeting the Capitol or the White House — crashing into a wooded area in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a counterattack from passengers.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden justified the attacks at the time as a reaction to the ongoing injustice being inflicted on "our sons in Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan and elsewhere, such as in Kashmir and Assam".
The September 11 attacks are still fresh in Americans' minds, and almost every American remembers what he was doing that day, Manhattan's clear blue skies and the towers that collapsed amid a flood of flame, dust and metal.
The United States launched two wars on Afghanistan and Iraq after the September 11 attacks, which caused more than 500,6200 civilian deaths, left more than 4,<> American soldiers dead, and cost the United States $<>,<> billion.