The attacks of September 11, 2001, marked a turning point in history, one that continues to shape world affairs. Twenty years later, FRANCE 24 travelled to Afghanistan, Iraq, France, Sweden and Belgium to meet some of the key players, who try to explain how the attacks happened and why they had such a profound global impact on the past two decades.

By Antoine Mariotti – adapted by Thomas Waterhouse
Camera: Fanny Allard and Sylvain Rousseau
Video editing: Julia Boudet



EPISODE 1: THE DEAF AND THE BLIND

16:42

On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center came crashing down and the Pentagon was attacked as a horrified world looked on. Al Qaeda, then a little-known organisation, had just committed the worst atrocity ever on US soil, even more deadly than the 1941 raid on Pearl Harbor. How could such a brazen attack be carried out on the world’s superpower? Former CIA agents, members of the Bush and Clinton administrations, and foreign politicians from the time give us their takes. We also interviewed Fahim Dashty, an Afghan journalist who witnessed the death of anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud just two days before the September 11 attacks. Dashty himself was killed on September 5 of this year in the Panjshir Valley.

EPISODE 2: THE AFGHAN QUAGMIRE

15:57

After the 9/11 attacks, then president George W. Bush launched a military operation targeting al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban regime that gave him sanctuary in what many viewed as a just war. But while US forces, with the help of Afghan resistance fighters, quickly managed to oust the Taliban from power and destabilise al Qaeda, they soon found themselves administering a crisis-wracked country.

EPISODE 3: THE IRAQ OBSESSION

16:09

Even as US forces invaded Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, hawks in the Bush administration were already thinking about targeting the regime of Saddam Hussein. Washington made the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that posed a significant threat to the United States and its allies – but many allies remained unconvinced. In the years since, some in the Bush administration have admitted that the intelligence on Iraq was flawed, at best.

EPISODE 4: IRAQ, A WAR TOO MANY

17:00

Despite stiff opposition from France, Russia and Germany, the US invaded Iraq in March 2003. American politicians from the time – as well as the UN’s special envoy for Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi, former French diplomat Bernard Bajolet and Iraq’s former prime minister Nuri Al Maliki – give us their side of the story.

EPISODE 5: THE SPIRAL

15:19

The arrival of US troops in Afghanistan signalled the start of the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, the man who orchestrated the 9/11 terror attacks. When he was finally found and killed 10 years later in Pakistan, Washington’s key objective was achieved. But the US would spend another decade in Afghanistan before withdrawing its forces this summer, allowing the Taliban to reclaim power. US President Joe Biden has said that ending America’s longest war was the right thing to do, but for others the sense of failure is palpable.



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