25 years after 9/11: Remembering Godwin Ajala, the Nigerian who held the door

On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial airliners and turned them into weapons. Two struck the World Trade Center’s twin towers in Lower Manhattan, one hit the Pentagon, and a fourth, believed headed for Washington, D.C., crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers fought back.

Within two hours, both 110-story towers had collapsed. By the end of the day, nearly 3,000 people were dead, the deadliest terrorist attack in history, and the deadliest single event on US soil since the Civil War.

Among the thousands caught inside the towers that morning was a Nigerian-trained lawyer working security at the World Trade Center. His name was Godwin Ajala, and twenty-five years on, he is remembered as the only Nigerian among the nearly 3,000 people killed that day.

Godwin Ajala’s story

Ajala was born on June 9, 1968, in Ihenta, a small town in what is now Ebonyi State, the son of a retailer. He grew up during the Nigerian civil war and went on to qualify as a lawyer in Nigeria. In 1995, hoping to build a better life for his wife, Victoria, and their three young children, he emigrated to the United States.

Like many immigrants with foreign qualifications, Ajala found his Nigerian law credentials didn’t transfer automatically. So he took a job as a security officer with Summit Security Services at the World Trade Center, working the early shift from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., then spending six to eight hours every day preparing to sit the New York State Bar Exam. He hoped that passing it would let him practice law in America and finally bring his family over to join him.

On the morning of September 11, when the second plane struck 2 World Trade Center, Ajala was stationed at a street-level security post in the building’s lobby. Rather than run, he held the doors open for people fleeing the building and went back inside the burning tower repeatedly to guide more people to safety. Exhausted from his efforts, he eventually collapsed, fell into a coma, and died six days later, on September 16, at the age of 33. He was one of 11 security guards who died at the World Trade Center that day.

Ajala never got to sit the bar exam again, never got to bring his family to America, and his name carries none of the wider recognition given to many other 9/11 victims. But he is listed on the National September 11 Memorial, and in Nigeria, his story is still quietly told as an example of quiet, unclaimed heroism from an ordinary immigrant who chose not to run.

Twenty-five years later

Ajala’s death was one small part of an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people and set off a quarter-century of consequences still unfolding today. Today’s anniversary is a milestone one — the biggest commemoration since the 20th — and a moment where the scale of what changed is worth taking stock of.

The immediate US response reshaped how the country governs itself. Congress passed the Patriot Act within weeks, expanding surveillance and law enforcement powers in ways that are still debated today. The Department of Homeland Security was created from scratch and is now the third-largest cabinet department in the US government. Air travel changed permanently: the liquids restrictions, the shoe removal, the body scanners, and the broader architecture of aviation security that spread to airports worldwide all trace back to the weeks after 9/11.

Militarily, the attacks launched what analysts now describe as the only war in American history designed without an endpoint: the War on Terror, fought first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and later extended into theatres as far apart as the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. That war toppled the Taliban within months in 2001: only for US forces to withdraw in 2021 and the Taliban to retake power almost immediately after. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s leader and the attack’s chief architect, was killed by US forces in Pakistan in 2011, a full decade after the towers fell.

A quarter-century on, foreign policy analysts describe the threat landscape as having fragmented rather than resolved and al-Qaeda has faded from global consciousness, but its place has been taken by a wider mix of threats: ISIS-linked groups, cyber warfare, drone attacks, and state-backed armed groups, a shift that was underlined again just this year by the fighting between the US, Israel, and Iran. Meanwhile, an entire generation has now grown up with no living memory of the attacks at all, even as they inherit a world still shaped by the response to them.