Ahmed al-Sharaa, the interim president of Syria, was named as one of Time Magazine's top 100 most influential people of 2025 on Wednesday.
The list was first published in 1999 but made a yearly event in 2004.
Sharaa is the Middle East's only leader on this year's list and is joined by seven other world leaders, including Keir Starmer and Donald Trump.
Sharaa, who led the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group which was formerly affiliated with Al-Qaeda, became the interim president of Syria after leading an offensive that ousted longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
He was nominated by former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford who described him as "soft-spoken" and "ambitious", noting that he fought with, then against, IS and al-Qaeda, while assembling alliances with rebels "often at gunpoint" and ruling a conservative statelet while reaching out to minorities.
"To beat Assad, the ambitious al-Sharaa understood he had to become a political leader as well as a military force," Ford said.
Since his appointment as interim president in late January, Sharaa has made whirlwind trips across the region meeting his counterparts, while his government has been working to undo sanctions and unlock funding to repair the war-torn country.
However, stabilising Syria has been difficult with a national army still being formed amid deep divisions within the country and sporadic sectarian killings still taking place.
The worst bout of violence occurred on Syria's coast in March and was sparked by an Assadist uprising. Around 803 people died, mostly Alawite civilians killed by militias loosely affiliated with government forces, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights.
The government promised an investigation but it has yet to publish its results.
"Observers are left to wonder if al-Sharaa is an Islamist extremist whose moderate poses are only ploys for temporary political gain, or if he's more a pragmatic politician who exploited extremist groups to gain power," Ford noted.
Sharaa was among four people from the region on the list. This includes Iranian director and former prisoner Mohammad Rasoulof, nominated by British-Iranian journalist Christiane Amanpour, who's latest film 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' was nominated for an Oscar.
Moroccan-born Ismahane Elouafi, former chief scientist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation was also listed, having been nominated by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for her work in agricultural research as executive managing director of CGIAR
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris's husband and former Second Gentleman of the US Douglas Emhoff nominated Noa Argamani, the Israeli captive held by Hamas in Gaza, for her advocacy for the release of the remaining captives after she was freed in an Israeli operation which killed over 270 Palestinians.