Hard to believe it’s been 19 years since the 2001 September 11 terror attacks in the US. Feels like just yesterday but also a lifetime ago that the tragic events of that day unfolded before our very eyes. Well, not quite for everybody as many of us only watched on TV, but I don’t think there was anyone alive at the time who didn’t hear about it.

In the aftermath, we all wondered how an attack of that magnitude could have been planned under the radar, and that’s just one of the many questions that remain unanswered to this day. The conspiracies don’t help. Was it an inside job or indeed a well-coordinated Al-Qaeda attack as official sources claim? Four planes were hijacked that morning and 19 hijackers are thought to have been involved, but for an attack of that scale, surely there must have been more co-conspirators.

Even if there weren’t though, how was the group able to keep such an explosive secret and eventually execute the brazen attacks on US soil? Who was the real mastermind because it is alleged it was Osama bin Laden but I don’t think even he was that sophisticated. Why those specific commercial flights? Why were the World Trade Center and Pentagon targeted? I think many of our questions have a lot to do with our perceptions of America as this invincible superpower and in many aspects it is.

Or maybe movies and propaganda are to blame but we all grow up marvelling at how advanced the US is and how good they are at gathering intelligence and yet they failed to foil that attack. As for the terrorists, I wonder if any of them had a change of heart, though it was probably too late to back out. Being the coward I am, I would have chickened out. I wish they’d been captured alive to account for their hateful crimes. Our lives were forever changed, especially those who lost their loved ones, but also travellers and those attempting to emigrate.

Remembering the nearly 3,000 innocent lives lost in a matter of minutes and praying for those nursing long-term injuries.