New York Marks 25 Years Since 9/11 With First Muslim Mayor

New York will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Friday with a ceremony at Ground Zero attended by four former presidents and the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, while President Donald Trump will mark the anniversary elsewhere.

Trump is scheduled to pay his respects at the Pentagon rather than in New York, where hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center and where most of the 2,977 people killed that day died.

Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s four living predecessors are expected at the ceremony in lower Manhattan. Republican George W. Bush, who was president when the attacks occurred, will be joined by Democrats Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

No speeches are planned. Instead, relatives of the victims will read the names of all those killed, with a bell rung to mark key moments during the attacks.

“Memorials like this and discussions about those events are an important part of keeping it alive and understanding how we prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again,” said Robert Kafka, a Chicago man in his 60s visiting the 9/11 Memorial.

Mamdani’s presence has become a political flashpoint, with a campaign led by the right-wing New York Post and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani urging him not to attend.

A petition supporting the campaign has collected more than 100,000 signatures. It accuses Mamdani of associating with unspecified people who are “dismissive of American institutions or insufficiently critical of extremist ideologies.”

City Council member Shahana Hanif criticized the campaign as discriminatory.

“It’s concerning to me that the mayor is being treated differently simply because he is Muslim,” Hanif told CNN.

Mamdani has also received praise for recently releasing thousands of documents detailing what city officials knew about air toxicity in Lower Manhattan after the attacks.

The collapse of the World Trade Center created an enormous dust cloud, followed by months of pollution and lingering debris. Thousands of New Yorkers have since developed cancer and other illnesses linked to the toxic exposure.

“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said Tuesday.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by 19 Al-Qaeda operatives who hijacked four planes on an almost cloudless morning in 2001. Two aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, causing the iconic 110-story buildings to collapse.

A third plane struck the Pentagon, while a fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers fought back against the hijackers.

The death toll has continued to rise in the years since the attacks. More than 9,400 people have died from 9/11-related illnesses, according to the federal program established to provide medical care to people affected by the attacks.

For millions of Americans, September 11 is now an event they did not experience or cannot remember. Around 100 million Americans were not yet born or were too young to remember what happened that day.

Logan Miller, 32, lost an uncle in the attacks and later lost his grandfather to a 9/11-related illness.

“I think the next generation just can’t fathom what actually transpired and how someone could be impacted by that, and so I actually find them asking more questions,” he told AFP.

Large crowds are expected in Lower Manhattan for the memorial ceremony, with security tightened around the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The Secret Service has installed a steel security perimeter around the site.

New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said an anti-drone team would also be deployed as a precaution, while stressing that authorities had received no intelligence indicating a specific threat against the gathering.

Al-Qaeda has marked the anniversary by releasing a video featuring images of its late leader Osama bin Laden and his son Hamza. Trump said in 2019 that Hamza bin Laden had also been killed.

Before the anniversary ceremony, a drone display illuminated New York Harbor with 2,977 lights, one for each person killed in the attacks.