The White House on Friday released video of U.S. President Joe Biden giving a speech to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attacks ahead of the 20th anniversary.

NEW YORK (AP) — The world solemnly marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, grieving lost lives and shattered American unity in commemorations that unfolded just weeks after the bloody end of the Afghanistan war that was launched in response to the terror attacks.

Victims' relatives and four U.S. presidents paid respects at the sites where hijacked planes killed nearly 3,000 people in the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil.

Others gathered for observances from Portland, Maine, to Guam, or for volunteer projects on what has become a day of service in the U.S. Foreign leaders expressed sympathy over an attack that happened in the U.S. but claimed victims from more than 90 countries.

"It felt like an evil specter had descended on our world, but it was also a time when many people acted above and beyond the ordinary," said Mike Low, whose daughter, Sara Low, was a flight attendant on the first plane that crashed.

"As we carry these 20 years forward, I find sustenance in a continuing appreciation for all of those who rose to be more than ordinary people," the father told a ground zero crowd that included President Joe Biden and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

In a video released Friday night, Biden said Sept. 11 illustrated that "unity is our greatest strength."

Unity is "the thing that's going to affect our well-being more than anything else," he added while visiting a volunteer firehouse Saturday after laying a wreath at the 9/11 crash site near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. He later took a moment of silence at the third site, the Pentagon.

The anniversary was observed under the pall of a pandemic and in the shadow of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is now ruled by the same Taliban militant group that gave safe haven to the 9/11 plotters.

"It's hard because you hoped that this would just be a different time and a different world. But sometimes history starts to repeat itself and not in the best of ways," Thea Trinidad, who lost her father in the attacks, said before reading victims' names at the ceremony.

Bruce Springsteen and Broadway actors Kelli O'Hara and Chris Jackson sang at the commemoration, but by tradition, no politicians spoke there.

At the Pennsylvania site — where passengers and crew fought to regain control of a plane believed to have been targeted at the U.S. Capitol or the White House — former President George W. Bush said Sept. 11 showed that Americans can come together despite their differences.

"So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment," said the president who was in office on 9/11. "On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab their neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know."

"It is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been and what we can be again."

Calvin Wilson said a polarized country has "missed the message" of the heroism of the flight's passengers and crew, which included his brother-in-law, LeRoy Homer.

"We don't focus on the damage. We don't focus on the hate. We don't focus on retaliation. We don't focus on revenge," Wilson said before the ceremony. "We focus on the good that all of our loved ones have done."

Former President Donald Trump visited a New York police station and a firehouse, praising responders' bravery while criticizing Biden over the pullout from Afghanistan.

"It was gross incompetence," said Trump, who was scheduled to provide commentary at a boxing match in Florida in the evening.

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Associated Press writers Michael Rubinkam in Shanksville, Pennsylvania; David Klepper in Providence, Rhode Island; Jill Colvin in New York; and Alexandra Jaffe in Shanksville and Washington contributed to this report.

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