“One fateful day in Peshawar [Pakistan], August 11, 1988, [bin Laden’s mentor] Sheikh Abdulla Azzam called a meeting to discuss the future of jihad. …One of Azzam’s objectives was to make sure that, in the event of an Afghan civil war, the Arabs were not involved. …He had come to agree with bin Laden about the need to establish a separate Arab group. …Although Azzam chaired the meeting, comments were directed at bin Laden, because everyone understood that the fate of jihad was in his hands, not theirs. …Few people in the room realized that al-Qaeda had already been secretly created some months before by a small group of bin Laden insiders.”
– Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, Pages 150-152