It felt like the fall of humanity.
`The world is going to be a very different place,' then-PM Chrétien noted
ROYA SHAMS, on the first time she saw footage of the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers following the 9/11 attacks.
Two decades later, it's hard to appreciate the pervasive sense of foreboding that arrived with the fire, blood and ash of Sept. 11, 2001.
That day's terror strikes blackened the Pentagon and felled the World Trade Center towers. Almost 3,000 people died in what was the deadliest assault on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
Everyone knew the violence had just started. Everyone knew the predictable world had been exploded from its axis. Everyone feared the next act of terror.
On this day 20 years ago, no one knew exactly how 9/11 would change their lives, but few doubted it would.
The most shocking event in a generation was the evil handiwork of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi billionaire who had declared war on the United States in an attempt to drive its armed forces from Muslim lands in the Middle East. Operatives from his spidery terrorist network, al-Qaida, had struck repeatedly at U.S. interests.
On Aug. 7, 1998, trucks filled with explosives, batteries, oxygen and acetylene tanks exploded outside U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people. On Oct. 12, 2000, an explosives-laden zodiac rammed the side of the USS Cole at anchor in Yemen, killing 17 sailors.
From his redoubt in Afghanistan, Bin Laden then orchestrated a plan to weaponize passenger planes against the financial and political capitals of the world's most powerful nation.
Most people watched 9/11 unfold on television: hijacked airplanes exploding into the iconic towers; smoke billowing from the Pentagon; the towers collapsing in a cloud of ash and paper; New Yorkers running through the fog of destruction.
In Ottawa, prime minister Jean Chrétien was in a breakfast meeting at 24 Sussex Drive with Saskatchewan Premier Lorne Calvert when executive assistant Bruce Hartley entered the room to tell him a plane had struck the World Trade Center. About 20 minutes later, Hartley interrupted again to say a second airliner had hit the south tower.
All doubt was removed: Terrorism had invaded North America. Calvert excused himself as Chrétien and senior aide Eddie Goldenberg went upstairs to discuss a response and watch the latest developments on TV. They saw the first tower collapse.
“The world is going to be a very different place,” Chrétien told Goldenberg.
Across Ottawa, many people believed the same thing: that history had been set on a new and unknowable course.
But, as the next two decades would prove, the fallout from 9/11 was not equally distributed — neither in Ottawa nor anywhere else in the world. Some people would suffer much more than others. Some would be deeply wronged; others would find infamy.
For these people, 9/11 would change their lives in ways both profound and irrevocable.
Canadian paratrooper Mike Trauner had just completed a 12hour patrol in Drvar, Bosnia, when he entered the mess hall to find people clustered around a television. Tired and hungry, Trauner joined the knot of soldiers to find out what was going on.
“There was a terrorist attack in New York,” one told him.
The Sudbury-born Trauner, a member of the Royal Canadian Regiment's 3rd Battalion based at CFB Petawawa, watched in disbelief as a second plane hit the south tower. Less than an hour later, the glass and steel behemoth collapsed. Trauner felt adrenalin surge though his body.
“The thing that went through everyone's mind was, `Oh God, what's going to happen now?'” he remembers. “I think I knew we were going to be going to war, but I obviously didn't know the extent of it: I was still thinking in peacekeeping terms.”
Like other NATO bases worldwide, the one in Drvar — home to a NATO stabilization force — went on high alert. Trauner joined his security detail and entered the post9/11 world. It would prove to be a particularly trying place for him — and for many others in uniform.
After completing his tour of duty in Bosnia, Trauner was back at CFB Petawawa, training for deployment to Afghanistan. The U.S. had launched its war against the Taliban in October 2001, and Canadian soldiers were on the ground by year's end.
Trauner expected to be in Afghanistan within months. But during one training exercise — a wintertime parachute drop — he fractured his spine. That meant his deployment to Afghanistan was delayed until September 2008, at which time Trauner's regiment was assigned to Kandahar province, a hotbed of Taliban activity.
Days after arriving in Kandahar, Trauner's security detail was ambushed by Taliban fighters. He would earn the Medal of Military Valour for climbing into the gun turret of his light armoured vehicle and laying down heavy machine gunfire to protect his unit.
Three months later, on Dec. 5, he was on a foot patrol west of Kandahar when a remotely detonated IED exploded beneath him. The blast obliterated his legs, severed three major arteries, and sent shrapnel tearing into his forearm and hand, fracturing bones in 25 places. Trauner would flatline twice that day before being brought back to life.
Two months later, he was wheeled into The Ottawa Hospital Rehabilitation Centre and began grinding through the painful, yearlong process of learning to walk on prosthetic legs.
During his recovery, he endured 18 surgeries, and battled through PTSD and depression with the help of his wife, Leah Cuffe. Unhappy with a desk job, he retired from the military in May 2017.
Trauner has since devoted himself to competition, taking part in the Invictus Games as a rower and cyclist, then joining the national Paralympic team as a kayaker. He's about to begin writing a book about his life.
The 20th anniversary of 9/11, he says, comes at a difficult time with Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban. “9/11 is incredibly important to me because so many soldiers lost their lives, lost limbs, lost family members, lost friends because of 9/11. It changed a lot of lives, including mine,” he says.
Canada lost 158 soldiers in Afghanistan, including Ottawa's Sgt. Marc Leger and Cpl. Robbie Beerenfenger, both 29.
Trauner is philosophical about his own injuries and believes another soldier would have been wounded if not him on that fateful day. “I'm a soldier and I accepted the responsibility of going to war, and this is the result of it, this is the cost,” Trauner says of his lost limbs.
But the events of the past month in Afghanistan have been more difficult to accept.
“I'm definitely angry, I'm definitely
So many soldiers lost their lives, lost limbs, lost family members, lost friends because of 9/11. It changed a lot of lives, including mine.
Along with my family, we were victimized. My son is a prisoner. My whole family was arrested ... We are still trying to cope with the consequences.
sad about it,” he says. “It's almost a slap in the face: That so many of my friends lost their lives, lost their limbs, have disabilities now, mental trauma, PTSD, and for what? For a political agenda? How fair is that to the soldiers that gave so much in Afghanistan and in Iraq?”
Ottawa's Mahboob Khawaja was working at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Ha'il, Saudi Arabia, when he learned of the 9/11 terror attacks.
He had been travelling to Saudi Arabia since the mid-1980s, mostly to help plan and develop university programs in that country. Khawaja's family was back in Orléans.
He watched 9/11 on CNN. “It was unthinkable what we were watching,” he says. “It was beyond rational imagination, what was happening ... It was a frightening moment.”
Today, from his home in Orléans, Khawaja, 79, continues to deal with the fallout from that day two decades ago. “Along with my family, we were victimized,” he contends. “My son is a prisoner. My whole family was arrested ... To this day, we are still trying to cope with the consequences.”
Born and raised in Pakistan, Khawaja moved to Canada in 1975 and later earned his PhD from Syracuse University. A social scientist and writer, he often worked abroad — in Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — while his wife looked after their five children. The family settled in Ottawa in 1993 as Khawaja continued to work overseas and write. In his published work, Khawaja decried the victimization of the Muslim world, and criticized Arab leaders who embraced Western values at the expense of Islamic ones.
His son would be among the handful of Ottawa Muslims who came to believe Osama bin Laden held the answer to those problems.
Three years after 9/11, Momin Khawaja was charged in connection with an al-Qaeda-linked bomb plot in Britain. Momin was arrested at the Department of Foreign Affairs, where he worked on contract as a software developer. It was March 29, 2004.
In an interview that day from Saudi Arabia, his father told the Citizen he thought the allegations were absurd. “We are a very peaceful, educated family,” he insisted.
Momin was the first Canadian charged under the country's new anti-terrorism law, which came into effect three months after 9/11.
One day after his son's arrest, Mahboob Khawaja was taken into custody by Saudi intelligence. Khawaja said he was arrested at the behest of Canadian authorities and questioned about his travel and his son. He was held for two weeks and released.
Momin Khawaja went on trial in June 2008 and pleaded not guilty to seven offences under the Criminal Code's new terrorism section. It was Canada's first major post- 9/11 terrorism trial, and the first to test the constitutionality of the new law.
Prosecutors relied on Momin's voluminous email to show he was a committed Islamic jihadist who idolized Bin Laden. They accused him of aiding and abetting a foiled 2004 plot to bomb civilian targets in Britain. Specifically, they said, he was building a radio-frequency device, dubbed the “Hi-Fi Digimonster,” to remotely detonate bombs.
Defence lawyer Lawrence Greenspon accepted the Crown's contention that Momin was a jihadist, but argued his client was not a terrorist since he did not intend to harm civilians and was unaware of the British bomb plot. Momin, he said, wanted to fight western invaders in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Justice Douglas Rutherford convicted Momin on five terrorism counts, but said there was not enough evidence to prove he knew the Hi-Fi Digimonster would be used against civilians.
Momin initially was sentenced to 101/2 years in prison, but the Court of Appeal for Ontario called that penalty insufficient and more than doubled its length.
In a 2013 interview with the Citizen, Momin said he was gradually drawn toward jihadist ideology after watching the suffering of Muslim civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11. He found like-minded groups on the internet, he said, and adopted their radicalized world view.
Momin, now 42, remains in prison serving a 24-year sentence. His father contends the life sentence imposed by the appeal court was “a political decision” cast in the fervid aftermath of 9/11. He calls his son's actions “a thought crime.”
“There's not a single person on this Earth who can say, `Momin Khawaja committed an act of violence against me,'” Mahboob Khawaja says. “He had wrong thinking, but was there anyone victimized by him? Was there any act of violence they could prove?”
As Ottawa's Abdullah Almalki watched the events of 9/11 unfold on television from his living room, he was filled with dread. “I thought it would have an impact on all Muslims living in North America, that's what I thought,” he says.
Almalki's concern was wellplaced, but he had no idea how close at hand the danger.
He would become one of four Arab-Canadians — two of them from Ottawa — detained and tortured overseas on the strength of faulty Canadian intelligence developed in the post-9/11 hothouse. Almalki would spend 15 gruelling years trying to uncover the truth behind his ordeal — and find justice.
“To correct it, you need to expose it,” says Almalki, a father of six. “I think it was important to my kids and my family to have my name cleared, but I also felt it was important for our country. We have a wonderful country, but there are lots of things we need to work on.”
Before 9/11, Almalki was an immigrant success story.
Syrian-born, he had attended Lisgar Collegiate, graduated from Carleton University engineering, and launched a business that exported wireless communications systems and their components.
His major client was Microelectronics International, a firm that sold equipment to Pakistan's army, police and security services. That work brought him to the attention of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 1998. Some of his equipment had been found in the possession of the Taliban.
Almalki met with a CSIS agent and explained he sold store-bought equipment to the Pakistani firm, Microelectronics, but did not control what they did with it. He also explained how he knew Ahmed Said Khadr, a former director with Human Concern International, a Canadian charity with projects in Muslim countries. Almalki had worked for HCI in Pakistan, where Khadr was his boss. The two clashed and Almalki left the job in 1994. (Khadr later was exposed as a ranking member of al- Qaida.)
In the aftermath of 9/11, Almalki came under renewed scrutiny by CSIS and the RCMP as the security agencies scoured their files for potential trouble. Caught flat-footed by al-Qaida, the U.S. was using all of its diplomatic might to collect intelligence from its allies, and Canadian officials were under pressure to produce results.
An RCMP-led task force, Project A-O Canada, was created in late September 2001 to investigate suspects in Ontario and Quebec. It shared unfiltered intelligence with the U.S.
Almalki became a central target. Agents questioned his friends and family. He was followed. His business shipments were searched. His home and office were searched. Almalki was questioned by Malaysian officials when he travelled.
In its zeal, however, the RCMP ignored its own findings while falling into casual racism. In one RCMP memo, dated Oct. 4, 2001, and released as part of a lawsuit, an investigator concluded: “O Div. (Ontario Division) task force are presently finding it difficult to establish anything on him (Almalki) other than the fact he is an arab running around.”
Despite that, the RCMP labelled Almalki “an imminent threat” in a memo to Syrian intelligence issued the same day, and linked him to al-Qaida.
The RCMP's incaution would have dire consequences.
On May 3, 2002, Almalki stepped off a plane in Damascus, Syria, to visit his ailing grandmother. He was taken into custody at the airport and brought to Far' Falastin, a prison operated by Syrian intelligence.
He would spend the next 22 months there, most of it in a small, dark cell Almalki likened to a grave. He was beaten with a cable, slapped, punched and hung from his wrists.
RCMP investigators sent three pages of questions to Almalki's Syrian captors in January 2003, even though Canadian officials warned it could result in his torture. Almalki also was failed by Canadian diplomats. During 22 months in detention, he was never visited by a consular official. Instead, Canadian diplomats helped deliver the RCMP's questions to Syrian intelligence.
Only after a Syrian judge cleared him of being a terrorist threat did Almalki return to Ottawa in August 2004.
His case was raised at the federal inquiry into the mistreatment of Maher Arar, an Ottawa computer engineer who was deported to Syria by the U.S. partly on the strength of faulty Canadian intelligence. Arar, tortured in Syria, was offered a formal apology and awarded $10.5 million in compensation by the federal government.
A separate inquiry into the cases of Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin found the three men were likewise failed by Canada. But Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper largely ignored the inquiry's findings and rejected a parliamentary committee's call to apologize and compensate them.
Almaki filed suit. But it wasn't until March 2017 — more than a decade after he launched the case — that the federal government finally agreed to an apology and compensation.
The struggle took 15 years, but as a Muslim, Almalki says, “I always believed that truth would prevail.”
Today, he does some engineering, consulting and mentorship work while also volunteering with human rights and charitable groups.
Almalki says he has tried to put the experience of the past two decades behind him, but he continues to live with its effects. “I live with the consequences of that torture daily,” he says. “What I try to do is manage the pain.”
What's more, Almalki continues to have his life circumscribed by 9/11 since he remains on the U.S. no-fly list, which severely limits where he can travel.
“It's troubling,” he says, “because it looks like it's not as important for these Canadian agencies to correct this, and work persistently with the U.S. side to correct the information and take my name off their list in the same way that they worked persistently to put my name on these lists.”
Roya Shams did not see the World Trade Center towers collapse until she was sitting in a history class at Ottawa's Ashbury College more than a decade after 9/11.
“It felt like the fall of humanity,” says Shams, now 26.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Shams was living in Kandahar, Afghanistan, then under strict Taliban control. A young girl, she learned to read and write in secret thanks to her progressive father, a police commander who believed that everyone — girls and boys — should be educated.
Shams' pens and paper were always hidden. She was taught never to wear nail polish outside. “There was always fear,” she says.
Although Shams doesn't remember 9/11 itself, she does remember that it ushered in a brief and blessed era in Afghanistan.
“9/11 basically allowed me, as a girl, to have hope because it got rid of the Taliban,” she says.
Under attack by the U.S.-led coalition and the Northern Alliance, the Taliban retreated to the Pakistan border regions in late 2001. Shams exercised her new freedoms: She studied English at the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre, taught young girls to read, and worked at a humanitarian organization.
It was there, in October 2010, that she met Toronto Star reporter Paul Watson, who wrote about her vaulting ambition: to go to university and become a politician.
But the Taliban's counter-insurgency campaign was steadily gaining force. In July 2011, Shams' father was killed during a police raid on a local Taliban commander. One month later, Shams' friend, Rabia Sadat, another young woman full of ambition, was shot dead by a Taliban assassin as she left home for her government job.
Shams went into hiding and appealed to Watson for help. A daring, strong-willed war correspondent, Watson set aside his conviction that reporters shouldn't get involved in their stories, and launched a quest to find Shams a school placement in Canada.
Ottawa's Ashbury College was the only one to reply; it even offered Shams a bursary.
She arrived in Ottawa in January 2012, weeks after fleeing Kandahar with the assistance of Watson and Toronto Star editor Michael Cooke.
In Ottawa, Shams overcame culture shock, loneliness and language deficits to graduate from Ashbury in 2015, then completed her degree in globalization and international development at the University of Ottawa. She's now studying for a master's degree while managing her small charity. The Shams Foundation helps impoverished Afghan children learn job skills.
Shams says it has been heartbreaking in recent weeks to watch the Taliban again take control of her native country. Her decade in Canada, she says, allows her to understand what the women and girls of Afghanistan have just lost.
“I know what freedom is like now, what it's like to stand on your own as a woman,” she says, adding: “I feel defeated. I feel we have lost so much.”
Much of her family remains in hiding in Afghanistan, waiting for their chance to escape the country. Shams spends her nights trying to communicate with them. “It's just exhausting,” she says. “There's no night and no day.”
She hopes the international community will stand against the inhumanity wrought by the Taliban, and not turn away from her beleaguered country two decades after 9/11.
“You can't just look away. It's not going to be OK,” she says. “They will never have the same values we do ... I am here, I am grateful, but at the same time, I am still there in Afghanistan.”
To correct it, you need to expose it. I think it was important to my kids and my family ... but I also felt it was important for our country.
You can't just look away. It's not going to be OK. … I am here, I am grateful, but at the same time, I am still there in Afghanistan.