Most people think that September 11th was the opening of the main Al Qaeda campaign, but it was really two days earlier, on September 9th, with the assassination in Afghanistan of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a key figure in the liberation of Afghanistan from the Soviets, who afterward had been fighting to liberate his country from the Taliban for years. No one paid much attention to the event at the time, but in hindsight, as the Wikipedia article notes, there is good reason to think that he was assassinated by bin Laden as a means of consolidating his power in Kabul, as part of the preparation for the attacks scheduled to happen two days later.

As a remembrance, here is an open letter from him to the American people, published in 1998.

[Update in the evening]

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