Time magazine (TIME) has chosen the Syrian director Waad Al-Khatib and the Syrian photographer known as "Caesar" to be on its annual list of the most influential people around the world for the year 2020;

To be the first time for the magazine to choose two Syrians in one year.

"Al-Khatib" entered this classification after her film "For Sama", which was nominated for the "Oscar" as the best documentary film for the year 2019 after it won a number of awards in international festivals, the most important of which is the award for best documentary film from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. BAFTA, and the Golden Eye Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Syrian director Waad Al-Khatib (French)

The film deals with the Syrian issue by documenting the days of the siege in the city of Aleppo, and through it the director was able to convey the moments of the Russian bombing of the city and its siege by the Syrian regime forces, and the film included personal events, including her marriage and her birth to her daughter Sama under those circumstances.

Time magazine described Al-Khatib's appearance at the Oscars as an "amazing" presence as a "Syrian Muslim refugee" walking on the red carpet with her young daughter, wearing a dress embroidered with an Arabic poem that says "We dare to dream and we will not regret the dignity."

Crimes revealed by Caesar

The photographer "Caesar" is a pseudonym for a dissident of the Syrian regime forces, who carried out one of the largest individual acts documenting the crimes of the Syrian regime after he leaked pictures of the bodies of victims of torture in prisons and starvation crimes between 2011 and 2013.

Caesar - who used to work in the Military Police Documentation Center - was able to collect tens of thousands of pictures of those killed by the Syrian regime forces and smuggled them to France, where he lives in hiding under the protection of the police.

Photographer Caesar helped the Syrians reveal the fate of their relatives, who are detained in Assad prisons (Al-Jazeera)

Based on these images, the US Senate approved a law bearing the pseudonym of the photographer "Caesar Act", which gives the US President the right to impose sanctions on persons and entities if they provide financial or technical support to the Syrian regime, or contract with any official institution affiliated with him or Government-controlled entities.

In addition to Khatib and Caesar, the "Time" list also included a number of medical leaders who have played a prominent role in the Covid-19 pandemic, such as WHO President Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in addition to a number of political leaders, such as US President Donald Trump and his rival, Joe Biden. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The American magazine "Time" annually selects 100 of the most influential personalities in the world according to criteria related to the extent of influence and influence of these characters (or a group of individuals), and these are divided into 4 categories: leaders, artists, thinkers, and heroes.