Source: Deutsche Welle
Twenty years have passed since the September 11 attacks. At Ground Zero in New York, the towers of a new World Trade Center rise above the skyline, and there is a memorial to the nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks. The city has bounced back and now has more residents than in 2001. Until the pandemic, the economy was booming.
But nothing is how it was in the US, large parts of the Middle East, and Afghanistan. The Taliban may be back, but when a terrorist attack recently killed some 170 Afghans and more than a dozen US soldiers during an evacuation operation at Kabul airport, it was the so-called “Islamic State” that claimed responsibility. That organization did not even exist 20 years ago when the “war on terror” began. Its emergence is closely linked to how the “war on terror” has been carried out.