The most played episodes among Podcast App listeners.

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   Number 1: Origins

   1957 - 1989 How and where does the story of 9/11 begin? The answer is a tale of two countries: Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. This first episode looks into Osama bin Laden's family history and formative years, his education, and the bin Laden family's long and highly profitable relationship with the Saudi royal family. The scene shifts after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 outrages Muslims around the world, including a young Osama bin Laden. He was one of many who were inspired to raise money or travel to Pakistan to help the Afghans fight against the Russian occupiers. The episode looks at how Afghanistan fit into American foreign policy interests during the Cold War, why the Soviets ultimately withdrew, and definitively answers the question to the widely speculated rumor: did the CIA have any connections with Osama bin Laden during the war?

   July 12, 2021·1h 10min
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   Number 2: The Sudan Years

   1989 – 1996 Battle-hardened Osama bin Laden is a war hero back in Saudi Arabia when Saddam Hussein threatens the peace and stability of the Middle East by invading and occupying Kuwait. He offers the services of his Afghan mujahedeen to the Saudi royal family to force the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. Much to his dismay and growing anger, the royal family declines his offer and invites the United States and its coalition allies to base their troops in the kingdom in preparation for the conflict ahead. In 1991, bin Laden and his family leave Saudi Arabia for Sudan, a country that at the time was the Wild West for international terrorism. Bin Laden forms ties with the regime, and establishes a network of businesses, charities, and NGOs with legitimate and illegitimate purposes to keep his fighters employed and his organization ready and capable to carry out its plans. He continues to develop the Al Qaeda organization in Sudan over the next five years, as it attempts its first attacks against the United States in Yemen and Somalia. After coming under international pressure, Sudan forces bin Laden to leave. He chooses to go to the one place he knew well and where he was still considered a hero.

   July 19, 2021·1h 11min
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   Number 3: Zero Hour

   The events of September 11, 2001 are explored from almost every possible angle: the hijackers; the flights; inside the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the first responders who risked their lives to save others in an unprecedented emergency; how the President of the United States and top White House officials reacted to the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. It is a story of ordinary people forced to do extraordinary things; of the best of humanity responding to the deeds of the worst; and of people making life or death decisions with incomplete and even inaccurate information. But most of all, it is fundamentally a story about how one day literally changed everything, a day whose repercussions we are still living through more than two decades later.

   April 02, 2022·2h 19min
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   Number 4: Ramzi and Khalid

   1990 – 1997 The assassination of a right-wing rabbi in a New York City hotel offers a hint of the larger threat to come, though its significance is not fully understood at the time. The assassin has ties to a Brooklyn-based cell of jihadists preparing for war, which culminates with the bombing of the World Trade Center. The lives of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are examined for the events and forces that drove them to lives of international terrorism, from Kuwait to the United States, United Kingdom, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Qatar and the Philippines. For a time, Yousef is the most wanted terrorist in the world, while his uncle KSM is barely on law enforcement’s radar. Together, they would develop a terrorist plot so ambitious, it would have killed thousands if it had been realized. The two of them would set the bar for Islamic terrorism for the next two decades.

   August 02, 2021·2h 3min
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   Number 5: On the Run

   2001 - 2002 In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States and its allies invade Afghanistan for the beginning of a decades-long stay. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are decisively routed in a matter of weeks, but Osama bin Laden manages to give the U.S. military the slip at Tora Bora. Meanwhile, the United States and other countries around the world begin to face new security challenges, from the outside as well as within.

   November 26, 2022·1h 37min
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