Nikita Shah headed to the ceremony at the ground wearing a T-shirt bearing the annual commemoration’s de facto tagline – “never forget” – and the name of her murdered father, Jayesh Shah. The family later moved to Houston, but often returned to New York for the anniversary of the attack that killed him and nearly 3,000 other people. “For us, it was being around people who experienced the same type of grief and the same emotions after 9/11,” said Shah, who was 10 years old when her father was killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. . Relatives and officials of the victims also gathered at the two other attack sites, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Other communities across the country mark the day with candlelight vigils, interfaith services and other commemorations. Some Americans participate in volunteer programs on a day that is federally recognized as Patriots’ Day and the National Day of Service and Remembrance. More than two decades later, 9/11 remains a flashpoint over the attack that reshaped national security policy and sparked a US “war on terror” worldwide. Sunday’s celebrations, which follow a landmark anniversary last year, come just over a month after a US drone strike killed a key al Qaeda operative who helped plan the 9/11 attacks, Ayman al-Zawahri. It also engendered — for a time — a sense of national pride and unity for many, while subjecting Muslim Americans to years of suspicion and bigotry and sparking debate about the balance between security and civil liberties. In ways both subtle and overt, the aftermath of 9/11 ripples through American politics and public life to this day. And the attacks have cast a long shadow over the personal lives of thousands of people who survived, responded or lost loved ones, friends and colleagues. Firefighter Jimmy Riches’ namesake nephew wasn’t even born when his uncle died, but the boy took to the podium to pay his respects. “You’re always in my heart. And I know you’re watching over me,” she said after reading part of the victims’ names. More than 70 of Sekou Siby’s colleagues perished at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the mall’s north tower. Sibi was scheduled to work that morning until another cook asked him to change shifts. Siby never got a job in a restaurant again. it would bring back too many memories. The Ivorian immigrant struggled with how to make sense of such horror in a country he had come to in search of a better life. He found it difficult to form the kind of close, family friendships he had shared with his colleagues at Windows on the World. It was very painful, he had learned, to bond with people when “you have no control over what is going to happen to them next.” “Every 9/11 is a reminder of what I lost and can never get back,” says Siby, who is now president and CEO of ROC United. The restaurant workers’ advocacy group grew out of a relief center for Windows on the World workers who lost their jobs when the twin towers fell. On Sunday, President Joe Biden plans to speak and lay a wreath at the Pentagon, while First Lady Jill Biden is scheduled to speak in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where one of the seized planes went down after passengers and crew tried to storm the cockpit as the hijackers headed for Washington. Al Qaeda conspirators had seized control of the jets to use them as missiles loaded with passengers. Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff attended the commemoration at the National September 11 Memorial in New York, but by tradition, no political figure speaks at the ground zero ceremony. Instead, it focuses on the victims’ relatives reading aloud the names of the dead. Readers often add personal observations that form an amalgam of American feelings about 9/11 — sadness, anger, cruelty, appreciation for first responders and the military, appeals to patriotism, hopes for peace, the occasional political outcry and a poignant record of graduations. marriages, births and daily lives lost to the victims. Some relatives also lament that a nation that came together — to some extent — after the attacks has since fallen apart. So much so that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which were reshaped to focus on international terrorism after 9/11, now see the threat of domestic violent extremism as equally urgent.
