WASHINGTON — Sunday marks 10 years since President Barack Obama announced to the nation and the world that U.S. Special Forces had killed the mastermind behind the deadliest terror attack in United States history.
On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
The 40-minute raid involved 25 SEALs and two Black Hawk helicopters, which were intended to hover above the compound as military personnel rappelled to the ground. One of the choppers had trouble, partially due to high temperatures, and was forced to land suddenly. The SEALs destroyed it, so sensitive technology wouldn't fall into the wrong hands.
The troops breached the compound's walls and fought their way up the stairs of the three-story structure. A shot to the head killed bin Laden.
Afterward, two Chinooks helped get the American troops out.
From aboard the USS Carl Vinson Nimitz-class supercarrier, bin Laden was buried in the Arabian Sea. The burial ritual was done within 24 hours, in accordance with Islamic tradition.
At the time, then-President Obama called bin Laden's death the "most significant" achievement in the nation's battle with al Qaeda.
"Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us," President Obama said. "We must – and we will – remain vigilant at home and abroad."
That's as true now as ever.
Just recently, two al Qaeda operatives told CNN the terror group would continue to wage its war against the U.S. "on all other fronts" even in the midst of President Joe Biden's announcement that American forces would withdraw from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Al Qaeda's goal, those operatives said, was to expel the U.S. from the "rest of the Islamic world."
A Washington Post opinion piece published Friday by Colin Clarke, research and policy director at The Soufan Group, reminded readers that major terrorism organizations are "often greater than the sum of their parts."
It pointed out that when affiliates – like Somalia’s al-Shabab and Syria’s Hurras al-Din – are factored into the equation, al Qaeda has somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 fighters around the globe and a presence in more countries than it did in September 2001.
The 9/11 attacks killed 2,977 people when 19 terrorists hijacked four California-bound commercial jets shortly after they took off from airports in Boston, Newark and the Washington, D.C. area. The attackers flew the planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in DC and a field in western Pennsylvania.
More Americans, including brave first responders, died in the years since from health complications related to the attacks.
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