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The world will this week remember the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States which killed almost 3,000 people. Ten years ago, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passanger planes which they then crashed into the World Trade Center complex in New York, the Pentagon building in Virginia and a field in Pennsylvania.

The main commemorative services will be held at Ground Zero, NYC, where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. They will include the unveiling of part of the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum project and are expected to feature a record number of participants from the families of those who were killed at the location in 2001.

This year’s commemorative services in NYC have already courted a lot of controversy as the organizers have not invited those who survived the 9/11 attacks, nor representatives of the various American churches. The recommendation of the White House that emhpasis should be put during the memorial services on the universality of terrorism has also come under heavy attack.

In Poland, which lost six of its citizens in the 9/11 attacks, the 10th anniversary of the event will be marked by, among other things, a special memorial concert at the Warsaw Philharmonic whose program will include Adagio for Strings by the renowned American composer Samuel Barber, and September Symphony by the acclaimed Polish composer and musician Wojciech Kilar.

The decennial will also likely be an occassion on which to discuss Poland’s security, as well as the political and economic ramifications that al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States have had for the country. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent declaration by the US of a global war on terror, Poland committed some of its troops to both the Afghanistan and the Iraq campaigns.

In Iraq, 22 Polish soldiers died; in Afghanistan, 29 Polish soldiers have lost their lives.