After two decade of terrorist attacks against its interests, the US government has taken various measures in both domestic and foreign affairs. But September the eleventh 2001 will go down as the most important date in recent history as it saw the US's biggest strategic adjustment since the cold war. Let's take another look at some major terror attacks US suffered in the past two decades.
September 11 2001 witnessed the most serious terror attack in American history. Terrorists hijack four US commercial airliners in a coordinated suicide attack. In separate attacks, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City catch fire and collapse.
The Pentagon is extensively damaged. The fourth airliner, also believed to be heading towards the White House, crashes outside Shanksville in Pennsylvania. Casualty estimates from New York put the possible death toll to 50,000, causing the economic losses up to thousands of billions of US dollars. After the attack, US President George W. Bush addresses the nation, saying the attack was an action of war.
That day, the US Federal Aviation Administration, for the first time in the American history, orders to shutdown the territorial air space. All told, September the eleventh 11 prompts the United States not only to readjust its territorial security strategy but also launch a series of international missions to attack terrorism.
The list of terror attacks on the US is long. In October of 2000, a terrorist bomb damaged the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen, leaving 17 sailors dead and 39 injured.
In August, 1998, terrorist bombs destroyed US embassies in Kenya's Nairobi, and Tanzania's Dar es Salaam. 258 are killed, and over five thousand are wounded. Among attacks targeting diplomatic agencies, it suffers the heaviest casualties in history.
A bomb exploded outside a US air force installation in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in June 1996. 19 US military personnel are killed in the Khubar Towers housing facility, and 515 are wounded, including 240 Americans.
Near the end of 1995 in Saudi Arabia's Riyadh, a US military training base was attacked by a car-bomb, killing seven people.
In April, 1995, a car bomb destroyed the Murrow Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding over six hundred.
Early in 1993, a bomb exploded in the underground parking garage in New York's World Trade Center, killing six people and wounding more than a thousand.
Throughout the 1980s, terrorists struck 13 times in 13 different places and all targeted the United States. Nearly seven hundred people were killed. More than five hundred were Americans, and more than 250 were wounded.
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