6/25/1996

On June 25, 1996, a “catastrophic explosion [occurred] in Saudi Arabia, at the Khobar Towers military-housing complex in Dhahran. The building served as the barracks for the 4404th Airlift Wing, which was enforcing the no-fly zone in Iraq. Nineteen American soldiers had died and nearly four hundred other people were injured. …The disaster site was a vast crater, eighty-five feet wide and thirty-five feet deep… The bomb was larger by far than the car bomb that had destroyed the Saudi National Guard training center the year before and even more powerful than the explosives that had killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995.”

 – Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Pages 269-270