Sadiq S BhatWashington, DC — Emily Carter was born nine days before two planes struck the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. Her mother told her that once, in passing, the way you might tell a child where they were born. For years it meant nothing more than a coincidence of timing.
"I was born right before it happened," Carter, who turned 25 recently, told TRT World. "I didn't really know what that meant. I just knew people talked about it every year around my birthday."
That is close to the whole of her relationship to September 11: a story told to her, not a memory she carries. Twenty-five years on, that distance defines an entire generation.
They inherited the wars, the airport lines, and the vocabulary of a conflict they never witnessed.
The scale of that gap is now measurable.
A Pew Research Centre survey conducted in late August 2026 found that one in ten American adults were born after the attacks, learning about that cataclysmic morning only through what others told them.
Among Americans aged 18 to 24, six in ten say they first encountered 9/11 in a classroom rather than at a kitchen table or in front of a television, and 4,025,933 children were born in the United States in 2001 alone, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention: an entire cohort that grew up inside a country already reshaped by that morning.
A single morning, four different childhoods
Farid Ahmad was born in Kabul the same year Carter was born in New Jersey. Years later, his father told him something had happened in America. Then his father told him something else.
"He said America came to Afghanistan," Ahmad, 25, says.
Ahmad grew up inside the consequence rather than the event, and a quarter-century later he is unconvinced the story is finished.
"People say it's over," he says. "But I don't know. Everybody knows somebody who was affected."
For Carter, the same phrase arrives secondhand, off a screen. "It was just this thing America was doing after 9/11," she says. "I never really thought about what the phrase actually meant."
Ahmad belongs to an even younger country than Carter's.
Afghanistan's population, estimated at roughly 38 million, has a median age of about 19, and by United Nations Population Fund estimates, close to two-thirds of Afghans are under 25.
Almost the entire country has lived its whole life inside the war that followed September 11, a fact of demography as much as of history.
A question that follows
Asina Rahman was six months old on September 11, 2001, growing up Pakistani American in Chicago. Her father tried to inoculate her early against a conclusion he knew she'd otherwise be handed by others.
"He said, 'They're not doing it because they're religious,'" Rahman, 24, told TRT World. "He wanted me to understand that."
She has needed the reminder more than once. A stranger once asked her, laughing, whether she knew any terrorists. "I laughed too, which I don't know why I did," she says. "I was just uncomfortable."
Omar Hassan, 20, born in Michigan five years after the attacks on 9/11, has fielded a version of the same question. "Someone asked me once what I make of September 11," he says. "I was like, 'I wasn't even alive.' I didn't really know what else to say."
Carter has never faced that question, and she knows exactly why.
"I think that's probably different for me," she says.
Rahman and Hassan belong to a US Muslim population that Pew Research Centre put at 3.45 million people in 2017, about 1 percent of the country, younger on average than the general population.
Explaining it to someone younger
Ask each of them how they'd explain September 11 to a child, and the answers don't quite match, even when they are circling the same ground.
Carter starts confident and then hedges. "Some terrorists flew planes into buildings, and a lot of people died," she says. "I'd probably have to explain the rest because that's a lot for a kid."
Ahmad has one addition he treats as essential. "I'd say some people attacked America and a lot of people died. Then America went to war," he says.
Rahman's version carries a warning her own father gave her years earlier. "I'd tell them what happened. The planes, the buildings, the people who died," she says.
"And I'd tell them that religion in general had nothing to do with it. I think that's very important."
Hassan's answer lands close to Rahman's, almost word for word, though the two don’t know each other.
"I'd say terrorists attacked the US and a lot of people died," he says. "And I'd probably tell them Muslims didn't, like, all do it or anything. It was some bad people."
No fixed address
None of the four young people who spoke to TRT World in the weeks before the 25th anniversary of 9/11 was old enough to remember the day that would shape their lives.
What they hold instead are secondhand images, family caution, checkpoints and a phrase that means something different depending on which side of the war it landed on.
For Carter, it is history, if inconvenient enough to still explain each September. For Ahmad, it is a story about Afghanistan, his homeland. For Rahman and Hassan, it is inseparable from growing up in America and being asked to answer for something they were too young to understand.
Twenty-five years later, the towers are a photograph to all four of them.
Says Rahman, “I don’t remember that day. I think my generation has mostly grown up trying to understand what happened, and hopefully we can move forward from it.”
