The first 'collateral damage' deaths occurred in New York. DAVID USBORNE reports that hundreds were Muslims and tells some of their stories.
The United States and Britain face the unavoidable risk, as they continue their bombardment of Afghanistan, that sometimes their missiles will crash into the wrong targets.
Buildings with no military significance will be flattened and, worse, perfectly innocent lives will be ended. We call it collateral damage.
When the terrorists, on the other hand, drove their hijacked jets into the twin towers, in New York, and the Pentagon, outside Washington, the world was numbed by the efficacy of their daring.
Yet the collateral damage was massive.
Here are a few names: Samad Afridi, Omar Namoos, Asad Samir, Yusuf Saad, Talat Hussain, Azam Ahsan, Qasim Ali Khan, Naseema Simjee, Ashraf Ahmad Babu, Mohammad Chaudhury, Jumma Haque. There are many more. All of them died in those attacks on the United States, and all were Muslims.
Many were working in the World Trade Center. Some were among the heroes who rushed to the scene to help the wounded, only to be crushed themselves. At least two were passengers on the aircraft.
Why have we not heard more about the Muslim victims of the horror in the US? Perversely, it was cast once again in terms of Islam v America, or Islam v Christianity - the same terms used by al Qaeda in its latest call to all Muslims to join its war on Britain and the US.
Yet Islam is in Britain and the US and New Zealand. Someone should have distributed that list of names.
Dr Mansoor Khan is a family doctor in Queens, New York, who opened a bereavement centre for Pakistani relatives of the victims of the twin towers tragedy. He theorises that the media are at fault because they have barely made mention of the Muslim victims because it gets in the way of a central convenience: that it was a them-against-us crime, and is now a them-against-us war.
"At the same time saying that Muslims are victims of the atrocity and that we are the perpetrators of it? I think that is hard for them to swallow," he says.
The confusion over how many Muslims were killed in the raids is great.
CNN, for example, will tell you that the number of Pakistanis who perished is 200. Has anyone told that to the demonstrators on the streets of Quetta and Islamabad? Here in New York, the list of those killed compiled by the Pakistani mission to the United Nations has only nine names.
The Muslim Parliament in Britain has said that 1500 Muslims of all nationalities died in the attacks. The Council on American Islamic Relations, in Washington, said 800.
Salman Hamdani, a laboratory technician, left his family home in Queens on September 11 to go to work at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, at the Rockefeller Centre, in Manhattan. He took the No 7 elevated subway train, as usual, but on that day he did not return.
Just 23, he was trained in emergency medical assistance. As far as anyone can guess, he took it on himself to climb on board an ambulance headed for the World Trade Center after the first of the planes hit. His training gave him reason to go close to the towers; perhaps he even went inside one of them. Their rubble became his tomb.
And so the terrorists killed Salman, too, a Muslim man born in Karachi, Pakistan. He came to America with his family when he was aged just 1 and still lived in the traditional Pakistani and Muslim home of his parents and two younger brothers.
Talat, his mother, teaches English to young teenagers; his father, Salim, owns a small shop. It is a home where Islam plays a large role. Salman was private about his faith, but serious, too. He read the Koran and prayed five times a day.
How will the terrorists justify that death?
Quite easily, perhaps, because Salman loved not only Islam but also the country they hated. As a teenager, he worshipped the Star Wars films, and he had never really grown out of the fascination. His navy-blue Honda Civic had personalised licence plates that said: "YungJedi".
He was studying for a master's degree part-time at New York University and his ambition was to be a doctor. Well-built, he was also on his high school's gridiron team.
Zara Khan roamed the streets of Manhattan for more than a week after the attacks, giving out small sheets of paper that showed a photo of her 29-year-old brother, Taimour Khan, and a phone number.
Taimour Khan was one of the first to know the terrorists' evil. He was a commodities trader for Carr Futures and he was already hard at work when the first of the planes smashed into One World Trade Center at 8.45 am. Carr Futures was on the 92nd floor. Taimour never had a chance.
Rahma Salie knew even sooner. A Muslim of Sri Lankan nationality who had lived in the US for 10 years, she was a passenger on American Airlines flight 11 that day, bound for Los Angeles from Boston. Hers was the plane that hit the north tower, the one that Taimour Khan was in.
The terrorists, of course, never made a mercy announcement before take-off: "All Muslims may now disembark, because this is not about you." So Rahma, who was 28 years old and seven months pregnant with her first child, was doomed to die from the moment she stepped on board, accompanied by her husband, Michael Theodoridis, 32. They were on their way to the wedding in California of one her best high-school friends.
Michael, in theory, should have been spared, too. A Greek-American, he had converted to Islam before marrying the sweetheart he had met in college.
"Everyone is affected, no matter what religion you are," said Haleema Salie, Rahma's mother.
Later, a cruel insult was piled on the grief of Rahma's family. A week after the terrorist attacks, the FBI put Rahma's name on a "watch list" of people with possible connections to the perpetrators.
They did it because she was on one of the flights commandeered by the hijackers, because her travel pattern - she was a consultant for a Boston IT firm - matched that of the terrorists and because she had a name that sounded vaguely Muslim.
She was eventually removed from the list, but not before several relatives were barred from taking flights as they tried to travel to Boston for her memorial service. One uncle was already on a US-bound flight from Tokyo when it was called back to the gate and he was taken off by police.
The FBI thus committed the crudest kind of discrimination and racial profiling.
Fear of discrimination or, worse, of physical harm is one explanation for the muddle over how many Muslims died and who they were. Families may not be coming forward to report that someone is missing because they are afraid of drawing attention to themselves.
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Map: Opposing forces in the war against terror