President Donald Trump vowed Friday that the United States would never forget the September 11, 2001 attacks and suggested the country was continuing the “war on terror” 25 years later by fighting Iran.
Speaking at the Pentagon after skipping the main 9/11 commemorations in New York, Republican Trump also hit out at domestic “fanatics” in an apparent swipe at Democrats.
“Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago. We will never, ever forget. That’s why we fight today,” Trump said in a speech.
“We don’t have a choice. There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win,” added the president, who was accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump.
One of the jets hijacked on 9/11 hit the Pentagon in Washington, killing 184 people who were remembered by a single bell tolling as their names were read out.
But presidents have previously marked major anniversaries by attending several sites, including New York, where the majority of the 2,977 victims were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Trump went on to link the fight against Al-Qaeda launched by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush to the US-Israeli war on Iran, which is now in its seventh month.
“Today we salute every member of the United States military who served in the ‘War on Terror.’ It is a war on sick, horrible terror,” Trump said.
“And we salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth also lashed out at Iran in his remarks at the Pentagon ceremony.
“Over the past six months, we have laid waste to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism. Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century,” Hegseth said.
The Iran war has slid into a stalemate with Iran largely maintaining its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, and keeping oil prices high, despite sporadic exchanges of fire with the United States.
Trump also turned to the domestic front, a day after a Republican convention for the US midterm elections in which Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Democrats of sympathising with the 9/11 attackers.
“A generation after 9/11, we also know that the final response to those atrocities and the ultimate victory over the perpetrators will not be found on a foreign battlefield,” Trump said.
Telling the story of a firefighter killed in the attacks whose son went on to become a US Navy veteran, Trump said it showed that “we can be a nation whose heroes are not fanatics for an abstract cause.”
In his speech to the Republican convention on Wednesday, Trump had used the same term: “With your vote in this election, you can tell these far-left lunatics and fanatics that America is not for sale to them or to anybody else.”
Republicans at the convention repeatedly trained their fire on left-wing Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed over his previous social media posts about 9/11.
The 9/11 attacks were a series of four coordinated suicide attacks carried out by the terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United States on September 11, 2001.
Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes. Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City, causing both towers to collapse. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon near Washington, D.C. Passengers on the fourth plane fought back against the hijackers, causing the plane to crash in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before it could reach its intended target.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed on the day of the attacks. Since then, many more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses, including diseases linked to exposure to toxic dust.
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