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Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the brother of the only Turkish citizen killed that day recalled his final phone call from the World Trade Center and urged Türkiye to keep his memory alive.
Zuhtu Ibis was working for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building on Sept. 11, 2001.
His brother, Mehmet Ibis, speaking to CNN Turk on the 25th anniversary of the attacks, recalled the final contact the family had with him.
After the plane struck, Zuhtu called home to say he was safe and that firefighters had arrived to evacuate the building.
“Don’t worry, I’m fine. We’ll see each other shortly,” he told his family before ending the call, according to CNN Turk.
It was the last time his family heard from him.
“Please, let the Turkish people not forget. Türkiye also lost a life in that attack,” Mehmet Ibis told CNN Turk.
Born in Yozgat in 1975, Zuhtu Ibis moved to the United States as a young man and later found work at financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald in New York.
Working in the World Trade Center had been one of his ambitions.
His office was on the 103rd floor of the North Tower, where Cantor Fitzgerald occupied several of the building’s highest floors.
Ibis was 25 when he was killed.
His name is now inscribed at the National September 11 Memorial in New York alongside the thousands of others killed in the attacks.
For his family, however, the hours and months after the attack brought another ordeal.
Mehmet Ibis recounted how he desperately tried to reach New York after learning that his brother was inside the World Trade Center, but access to the city was heavily restricted.
During the search, he and three others fell asleep in a car after hours spent trying to get closer to Manhattan.
Ibis said police officers who approached the vehicle detained them and questioned them as possible suspects.
He recalled officers repeatedly asking about a bomb and said one pointed a gun at his head during the encounter.
Ibis described the episode as the worst experience they endured while trying to find his brother.
The family continued waiting for news.
Zuhtu Ibis’ remains were identified months after the towers collapsed and were taken to his family’s home village of Sariyaprak in Yozgat for burial.
The Sept. 11 attacks killed 2,977 people in New York, at the Pentagon outside Washington and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four passenger planes.
Two were flown into the World Trade Center towers, a third struck the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought the hijackers.
The attacks transformed U.S. foreign and security policy and led to the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, NATO’s first invocation of its Article 5 collective defense clause and sweeping changes to domestic and international counterterrorism measures.
On Friday, families and survivors again gathered in New York to mark the 25th anniversary, with the names of those killed being read aloud at Ground Zero.
Among those names is Zuhtu Ibis.
For his brother, a quarter-century later, the message remains simple: Türkiye lost someone on Sept. 11, too, and he should not be forgotten.
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