A meeting between Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, and leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad in Afghanistan culminates in the formation of Al-Qaeda.

Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl or Abd Al-Qader Bin 'Abd Al-'Aziz, has been described as a "major" figure "in the global jihad movement." He is said to be "one of Ayman Al-Zawahiri's oldest associates", and his book al-'Umda fi I'dad al-'Udda, was used as a jihad manual in al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Fadl is reported to be one of the first members of Al Qaeda's top council.

Osama bin Laden was a militant leader who was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, Bin Laden participated in the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Union, and supported the Bosnian mujahideen during the Yugoslav Wars. Opposed to American foreign policy in the Middle East, Bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 and advocated attacks targeting U.S. assets in various countries, and supervised the execution of the September 11 attacks inside the U.S. in 2001.

Abdullah Yusuf Azzam was a Palestinian-Jordanian Islamist jihadist and theologian. Belonging to the Salafi movement within Sunni Islam, he and his family fled from what had been the Jordanian-annexed West Bank after the 1967 Six-Day War and pursued higher education in Jordan and Egypt before relocating to Saudi Arabia. In 1979, Azzam issued a fatwa advocating for "defensive jihad" in light of the outbreak of the Soviet–Afghan War, and subsequently moved to Pakistan to support the Afghan mujahideen.

The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, formerly called simply Islamic Jihad and the Liberation Army for Holy Sites, originally referred to as al-Jihad, and then the Jihad Group, or the Jihad Organization, was an Egyptian Islamist group active from the late 1970s until its 2001 merger with Al-Qaeda. It was long considered an affiliate of Al-Qaeda and under worldwide embargo by the United Nations. It was also banned by several individual governments worldwide. The group is a proscribed terrorist group organization in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000.