By Rana Foroohar When the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange rang out on Sept. 19, it marked the biggest IPO the world had ever seen — bigger than Facebook’s or General Motors’. This new Wall Street juggernaut, based 7,000 miles away in Hangzhou, China, is Alibaba. Its founder and chairman, 50-year-old Jack Ma, is now challenging some of the most powerful companies on the Internet, including Amazon, eBay and PayPal. And he is doing so by melding Western entrepreneurship with a canny—and sometimes controversial—sense of how to profit in the world’s most populous nation. As with so many Chinese enterprises, comprehending the enormity of Ma’s creation requires thinking on a different scale. Alibaba is used by more than a third of China—some 500 million people—making it easily one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world. Those customers come to Alibaba to shop in the electronic malls it operates, where some 8.5 million merchants, large and small, ply their goods. 
 
 Increasingly, Chinese pay for those goods—and conduct all kinds of other transactions—using Alipay, a PayPal-like service affiliated with Alibaba that is now one of China’s most important financial entities. In fiscal year 2014, Alibaba generated $8.5 billion in revenue, nearly half of it profit. And Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO made Ma one of the world’s wealthiest individuals. (Read More: Behind the Person of the Year Images) 
 
 But even those figures obscure the significance of Alibaba’s rise and the extent to which it has been propelled by Ma’s deft understanding of how to do business in his homeland. Since it began in 1999 by linking Chinese manufacturers with foreign and domestic buyers, Alibaba has played a crucial role in China’s digital opening to the West. Having previously worked in the Ministry of Trade, Ma was able to ensure support from the Communist Party government and take on bigger competitors in China’s private sector. His innovations were not just technical but also diplomatic and strategic. Like many Chinese, Ma comes from almost nothing: he is the son of traditional storytelling performers who taught himself English by tagging alongside tourists at a local hotel. Later he became a teacher and traveled to the U.S. Searching the World Wide Web for information on Chinese beer and coming up dry, he vowed to bring China online, at a time when only 1% of the population was on the web. 
 
 A few years later, Ma started Alibaba in his apartment with 17 friends. His first employee was his wife, who now looks after the couple’s two children. Zhang Yin has claimed that she fell for Ma despite his unexceptional looks because he had the capacity to do things other men couldn’t. Friends have also been drawn to that ambition. “Jack had the biggest dreams of anyone I’ve ever known,�? says Porter Erisman, an American adman who left his job at Ogilvy & Mather in Beijing to work for Ma early on. “You’d come up with a goal, and he’d immediately ask you to triple it.�? A consummate spinner of corporate narrative, Ma is full of Shaolin-monk-style sound bites. “eBay is a shark in the ocean. We are a crocodile in the Yangtze,�? he famously proclaimed. “If we fight in the ocean, we will lose. But if we fight in the river, we will win.�? Ma claims to base his management technique on Chinese martial-arts teachings, encouraging employees to adopt nicknames from kung fu novels. (His own, Feng Qingyang, is a nod to an aggressive master swordsman.) Like the best martial artists, he is capable of turning weakness into strength. In the years before Alibaba went public, for instance, Ma leveraged his freedom from Wall Street pressure on quarterly earnings to keep his site free for a long time, building market share. Obliged to show shareholders progress on profit margins, eBay watched as Alibaba scooped up business. ||||| By Nancy Gibbs 
 
 Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, says the proverb, but rather the hero’s heart. 
 
 Maybe this is true in any battle; it is surely true of a war that is waged with bleach and a prayer. 
 
 For decades, Ebola haunted rural African villages like some mythic monster that every few years rose to demand a human sacrifice and then returned to its cave. It reached the West only in nightmare form, a Hollywood horror that makes eyes bleed and organs dissolve and doctors despair because they have no cure. 
 
 But 2014 is the year an outbreak turned into an epidemic, powered by the very progress that has paved roads and raised cities and lifted millions out of poverty. This time it reached crowded slums in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone; it traveled to Nigeria and Mali, to Spain, Germany and the U.S. It struck doctors and nurses in unprecedented numbers, wiping out a public-health infrastructure that was weak in the first place. One August day in Liberia, six pregnant women lost their babies when hospitals couldn’t admit them for complications. Anyone willing to treat Ebola victims ran the risk of becoming one. 
 
 Which brings us to the hero’s heart. There was little to stop the disease from spreading further. Governments weren’t equipped to respond; the World Health Organization was in denial and snarled in red tape. First responders were accused of crying wolf, even as the danger grew. But the people in the field, the special forces of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Christian medical-relief workers of Samaritan’s Purse and many others from all over the world fought side by side with local doctors and nurses, ambulance drivers and burial teams. 
 
 Ask what drove them and some talk about God; some about country; some about the instinct to run into the fire, not away. “If someone from America comes to help my people, and someone from Uganda,” says Iris Martor, a Liberian nurse, “then why can’t I?” Foday Gallah, an ambulance driver who survived infection, calls his immunity a holy gift. “I want to give my blood so a lot of people can be saved,” he says. “I am going to fight Ebola with all of my might.” 
 
 MSF nurse’s assistant Salome Karwah stayed at the bedsides of patients, bathing and feeding them, even after losing both her parents—who ran a medical clinic—in a single week and surviving Ebola herself. “It looked like God gave me a second chance to help others,” she says. Tiny children watched their families die, and no one could so much as hug them, because hugs could kill. “You see people facing death without their loved ones, only with people in space suits,” says MSF president Dr. Joanne Liu. “You should not die alone with space-suit men.” 
 
 Those who contracted the disease encountered pain like they had never known. “It hurts like they are busting your head with an ax,” Karwah says. One doctor overheard his funeral being planned. Asked if surviving Ebola changed him, Dr. Kent Brantly turns the question around. “I still have the same flaws that I did before,” he says. “But whenever we go through a devastating experience like what I’ve been through, it is an incredible opportunity for redemption of something. We can say, How can I be better now because of what I’ve been through? To not do that is kind of a shame.” 
 
 So that is the next challenge: What will we do with what we’ve learned? This was a test of the world’s ability to respond to potential pandemics, and it did not go well. It exposed corruption in African governments along with complacency in Western capitals and jealousy among competing bureaucrats. It triggered mistrust from Monrovia to Manhattan. Each week brought new puzzles. How do you secure a country, beyond taking passengers’ temperatures at the airport? Who has the power to order citizens to stay home, to post a guard outside their door? What will it take to develop treatments for diseases largely confined to poor nations, even as this Ebola outbreak had taken far more lives by mid-October than all the earlier ones combined? 
 
 The death in Dallas of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed on U.S. soil, and the infection of two nurses who treated him, shook our faith in the ability of U.S. hospitals to handle this kind of disease. From there the road to full freak-out was a short one. An Ohio middle school closed because an employee had flown on the same plane as one of Duncan’s nurses. Not the same flight, just the same plane. A Texas college rejected applicants from Nigeria, since that country had some “confirmed Ebola cases.” A Maine schoolteacher had to take a three-week leave because she went to a teachers’ conference in Dallas. Fear, too, was global. When a nurse in Spain contracted Ebola from a priest, Spanish authorities killed her dog as a precaution, while #VamosAMorirTodos (We’re all going to die) trended on Twitter. Guests at a hotel in Macedonia were trapped in their rooms for days after a British guest got sick and died. Turned out to have nothing to do with Ebola. 
 
 The problem with irrational responses is that they can cloud the need for rational ones. Just when the world needed more medical volunteers, the price of serving soared. When nurse Kaci Hickox, returning from a stint with MSF in Sierra Leone with no symptoms and a negative blood test, was quarantined in a tent in Newark, N.J., by a combustible governor, it forced a reckoning. “It is crazy we are spending so much time having this debate about how to safely monitor people coming back from Ebola-endemic countries,” says Hickox, “when the one thing we can do to protect the population is to stop the outbreak in West Africa.” 
 
 Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease, and “us” means everyone, not just those in faraway places where this is one threat among many that claim lives every day. The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight. For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year: The Ebola Fighters 
 
 Runner-Up: Ferguson Protesters, The Activists 
 
 Runner-Up: Vladimir Putin, The Imperialist 
 
 Runner-Up: Massoud Barzani, The Opportunist 
 
 Runner-Up: Jack Ma, The Capitalist ||||| Kaci Hickox, 33 Nurse with MSF quarantined in U.S. Bryan Schutmaat for TIME I was deployed to the second largest town in Sierra Leone, called Bo. I was the Medical Team Lead of a 35-bed Ebola Case Management Center. We worked 12-to-14-hour shifts six days a week, and working in the PPE was cumbersome. Every inch of your body is covered. It’s very warm in Sierra Leone, in the high 90s when I was there, and the suit isn’t breathable. Worst of all, the suit doesn’t give you the opportunity to look people in the eye easily, and with the mask over your mouth you feel like you have to yell to communicate. You feel like you don’t have time to really care for patients the way you would like. I think a lot of people in the U.S. think of Ebola treatment as ICU-level care, but the truth is, keeping patients clean to make them feel good and encouraging them to drink and eat is the core of Ebola treatment in West Africa. There were so many devastating moments. There was a friend of mine who was from Sierra Leone, and I was the one who told him that his test came back positive for Ebola. I chose to tell him at a distance from across a fence so that I could do it in my normal clothes and look him in the eye. He had the most blank look on his face. It was complete shock. He walked away and went back to his room where I couldn’t see him. He didn’t want to speak anymore. When you tell someone they have Ebola, they know what it means. They’re scared. They’re sad. They’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen because that’s all we can do. There is no cure. He was young and strong, but he did not survive. But there were also moments that brought hope. When someone survived, the whole clinic team gathered together. The patient would take a final shower of chlorine and soap and leave the patient area with fresh clothes. Everyone clapped and danced. There was one woman who was being discharged, and I asked her if she was excited. She said, “Yes, I lost two of my children to Ebola, but I have one daughter left on the outside and I want to go take care of her.” It was so beautiful. When it was time to leave Sierra Leone I was torn. On the one hand I was tired and I knew I needed to go home. But you put all this time and energy into this clinic and the local staff. It’s really difficult to leave knowing the outbreak is nowhere near being over. When I stepped off the plane in Newark Liberty International Airport in late October, I knew I would be asked questions because I was aware there was a monitoring process taking place in the U.S. When I handed my immigration forms to the immigrations official, I told him I’d been in Sierra Leone and I was treating Ebola patients, and he said, “O.K., no worries, they’ll ask you some questions.” He walked me to the CDC quarantine office in the airport. They took my temperature, which didn’t surprise me, and it was normal. It didn’t surprise me when they asked me questions about my work and possible exposures. What did surprise me was that no one seemed to be in charge. Everyone seemed very nervous and scared. No one was clear about what they were doing and why. That was what started making me nervous. I was in the airport for over six hours. At one point, the New Jersey director of infectious disease at the department of health called me and said, “We are going to have to quarantine you.” I said I didn’t understand why. I didn’t have any symptoms, and if you’re not symptomatic you can’t transmit Ebola. I only had contact with Ebola patients when wearing full personal protective equipment. He alluded to the fact that it wasn’t him making the final decision. I wondered who was. A few hours after I arrived, someone took my temperature again and said I had a fever. I disputed this because by then, I was very frustrated and my face was flushed, which could result in a false positive reading using a temporal scanner thermometer. They said, “We are going to need to take you for evaluation.” I had to ask which hospital I was being taken to—they didn’t tell me that information without me asking—and I waited another hour before the ambulance arrived to take me to the hospital, where I was put in a tent. I tested [negative] for Ebola. Eventually I was released to be quarantined at my home in Maine, something I contested again. A Maine judge overturned the quarantine. I have witnessed the devastation Ebola causes and have personally experienced the stigma that fear of this disease brings. Still, I hope that compassion and knowledge will soon overcome the fear so that we can beat Ebola. I do want to go back to West Africa, but for now, I’m taking things day by day. —as told to Alexandra Sifferlin 
 
 Iris Martor, 32 Nurse at the More Than Me Academy, a school for vulnerable girls from the West Point slum of Monrovia Jackie Nickerson for TIME We have these big buses in Monrovia. On these buses you have, like, 200 passengers, and on my way to Monrovia from where I live is a long journey. So you have a lot of people from different walks of life and a lot of different conversations that come out. So it was in the buses I first heard about Ebola. Initially two people will say the government is telling the truth about this new sickness we are hearing about. But 198 will say the government is lying. I was sitting next to some person when the argument came to hand. I decided to ask, “What is this sickness that the government says is coming?” He explained it to me. I became interested, and I started to follow up. So for me, I said, if the international community is putting their money in for this sickness, I want to believe it. But the majority in Liberia did not believe. The incident that occurred that really brought fear into the minds of Monrovians was when the outbreak started in Redemption Hospital [in early June]. A nurse and a few other health workers at the hospital died of Ebola. This nurse treated a patient that came from Sierra Leone, and most of her colleagues attended to her, and eventually she died, and then this Ugandan expatriate [doctor] contracted Ebola and also died. And then everybody began to see the evidence of Ebola. When Redemption got hit, people were really scared, and they stayed away. The other hospitals were scared too—when a staff member got infected and maybe died, then everyone got afraid. So that is how eventually all the health facilities and clinics started to shut down. Even private hospitals, at a certain point in time, closed down. In the rainy season, you have a big increase in malaria cases and in diarrhea cases—you find a lot of sick people normally. Then we had this stranger called Ebola. So all the hospitals were closed, and the only places that were open were ETUs [Ebola Treatment Units]. So it meant that every person that was sick in the community needed to go to the ETU to be triaged from there. To be tested, to say O.K., this is positive, go [to the treatment center], or negative, so get some treatment and go home. And the ETUs didn’t have the capacity to take many people. The point [when I realized I had to do something] was when we were finding out that people were dying from other sicknesses. It was August. We decided to bring in the home-care nurses because malaria was killing children and adults. Other sicknesses that could be treated were killing people because there were no facilities that they could go to. We go to the homes of the sick and do the assessment. If we see that the patient has signs that are related to Ebola, we link them to the ambulance service. And they take them to the ETU. Where there is no case [of Ebola], we do another investigation to see what is going on. Before Ebola, I was already the school nurse. Then after Ebola started to escalate, we started to go into the community to look after our students, to really care for them. We didn’t want any of them to get sick, and praise be to God none of them had gotten sick of Ebola. So I and my team, we would go house to house where our students lived in West Point. And we sensitized them and we gave them materials to help. [But] what could the aid do, if I only sensitized my student, and I see this neighbor and that neighbor have Ebola? I leave that neighbor alone, and the neighbor contracts the virus, there is a possibility that my student can contract the virus. So when the number of sick people began to increase, More Than Me saw the need that they should do a bigger intervention than just limiting to their students. Now we visit every house where there is a sick person. Home care is dangerous because you don’t know the environment. If it is in a hospital setting, you are sure of your environment because that is where you work. And you know that this is an ETU, and everyone has Ebola, so you know how to act. But going into a home where it is not confirmed whether the patient has Ebola or not, that makes it dangerous. Whatever way you do it, it is a risk. So we did it in a way to reduce the risk. The only way you can get Ebola is through direct contact with the body fluids of an infected person. So whether a person shows signs of Ebola or not, consider a sick person as a suspect. That is clear. So don’t touch. Don’t even sit. Now you talk to the patient at least one meter apart. Based on what the patient says, based on what you have seen—if you are a professional nurse, if you see these signs, it suggests this. Sometimes it might suggest two things, but if you probe and ask follow-up questions, then you rule out one and it points to one. So based on that, you treat. As a nurse, when you are graduating, you swear an oath to take care of life. Initially I was afraid. I should admit that. I don’t want to die. I have my family, I have my children. But if I don’t help, I will still not be free. I might be more exposed, and this time around my entire family could be wiped away. God forbid, if I died in the fight maybe my children and my parents could live. So I decided to take that courage and to go out there and help my fellow Liberians. Because that is the oath that I swore. If someone from America comes to help my people, then why can’t I? This is my country. I should take the first step, and someone can walk in my footsteps. The cases are going down, yes, but in my opinion, it is not time to celebrate. It is time to be more cautious. Ebola has not been completely eradicated. It is still around. The more we start to get complacent and become careless, there is a possibility that it may shoot up again. As long as Ebola is still in Guinea and Sierra Leone, I can tell you that Liberia will not be free. If I become a decisionmaker in this country, I would like for this country to always have a contingency plan. If we had had a contingency plan, [Ebola] wouldn’t have spread as it did. So there should be a lesson learned for any Liberian who lives after Ebola is gone. Policymakers should be able to look at this experience and really plan for the future. Because tomorrow it may not be Ebola, it may be some other things. —as told to Aryn Baker 
 
 Nina Pham, 26 Nurse at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Bryan Schutmaat for TIME The first time I heard the word Ebola, it was probably when they were doing all the coverage about Dr. Brantly and Nancy Writebol. When I heard it in Dallas, it was a couple of hours before I was to get Mr. Duncan as my patient. That day, my manager came to me and told me we had this patient in the ER who was going to come up to the intensive care unit—and that we were ruling him out for possible Ebola. I was obviously scared, but I chose to keep my assignment. It’s part of who I am—nursing is a calling. There was a patient who needed help, and I was going to help him. I wouldn’t have denied the assignment. I replay it over and over again in my head how I could have gotten infected. If I had to guess when it happened, it probably would have been in the first couple of days, when Mr. Duncan wasn’t in control of his bodily fluids, and he didn’t have catheters and tubes in place. We had to go in there and do blood sticks and deal with intimate procedures that were very high-risk. I did everything the CDC and the hospital recommended, from how to put on the personal protective equipment to how to take it off. I even interviewed with the CDC in the hospital after I took care of Mr. Duncan, and they deemed me no risk. So it was just a shock when my chief nursing officer, Cole Edmundson, and a CDC officer came to see me in their full protective equipment. I saw Cole’s eyes, and they were red from crying. I knew immediately it was not good. I think my heart just sank. I was in a little bit of denial at first. I started calling my family and telling them what happened, and that I loved them. Because Mr. Duncan had died three days prior, flashbacks started coming to my head of how his disease progressed and eventually led to his death. That’s the kind of thing that came to my mind when I found out. But now, I hope we as Americans know it’s still such a big issue in West Africa, and I think it’s important as a global community to help each other out. It’s not about closing off our borders or leaving people to fend for themselves. —as told to Alice Park ||||| “To have an African doctor, who grew up in a shantytown in probably one of the most disadvantaged countries in the world, on the cover of TIME magazine’s Person of the Year is the right thing to do,” says Jackie Nickerson, the fine-art photographer who shot the cover of TIME’s Person of the Year. 
 
 This year, TIME chose to highlight the incredible work Ebola fighters are doing to bring to a stop an epidemic that has killed more than 6,000 people. TIME commissioned Nickerson and U.S. photographer Bryan Schutmaat to shoot more than 20 portraits in 12 locations around the world—from London to Geneva, Boston to Dallas, and all the way to Monrovia, Liberia. 
 
 “I was working on a job in Paris when Kira Pollack and Paul Moakley [the director and deputy director of photography at TIME] called me,” says Nickerson. “They told me they had this assignment for me and asked if I could go to Monrovia. I immediately knew this was an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bear witness to this moment in history. There was no doubt in my mind that it was something I wanted to do.” 
 
 Nickerson was surprised. “I had actually never worked for TIME before,” she says. “I had no idea what the commission process was, so this call came out of the blue.” 
 
 Meanwhile, Schutmaat was in Amsterdam attending World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass when he received his phone call. “My schedule was very busy, and I thought [being in Europe wouldn’t work], but photo editor Natalie Matutschovsky, who’s been championing my work at TIME, just said: ‘That’s good, because two of the subjects we need you to shoot are in Europe already.’” The following week, he was on a flight to Geneva. 
 
 Both photographers were selected for their strong sense of aesthetics, which come from their fine-art backgrounds. “They are celebrated artists,” says Pollack. “There is a heartbeat to Nickerson's portraits that lent itself to just the right mood for this project. She’s spent a considerable amount of time working throughout Africa. She is agile and informed on how to photograph in the harsh African light, and her portraits are honest and beautiful. Schutmaat's studied portraits have an almost painterly quality. There is something very telling about capturing a body posture or a simple gesture.” 
 
 For weeks, TIME had been preparing for Nickerson’s assignment. “We talked to NGO workers, journalists and photographers who had been in the field before we decided to go ahead do this,” says Moakley. “We talked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and we packed everything we needed—including Personal Protective Equipment suits for all of us.” 
 
 TIME’s Africa Bureau Chief Aryn Baker, who spent the summer covering the Ebola epidemic, met Nickerson and Moakley in Monrovia. “Aryn did a lot of the work ahead of time as well,” says Nickerson. “With Paul, she had selected the sitters, so we had a very good idea of who we were going to shoot, so that made things incredibly easy for me.” 
 
 Few people would know Dr. Jerry Brown’s name. The Liberian doctor, who is featured on the first of five covers shot for TIME’s Person of the Year issue, opened his country’s first Ebola treatment center in early 2014, at a time when many of his colleagues failed to react to the growing epidemic. “There was a kind of gravity to the way Dr. Brown and his staff were working,” says Nickerson. “When we met [him], we had the idea to do something very simple against a plain color, something of a more formal portrait. And then, he invited us to go into the reception area where he gets dressed. It was a very simple, bare room. It had a single light bulb, and I just thought it captured the atmosphere and gravity of what they were doing.” 
 
 The photograph is not a staged shot: It’s a portrait that was caught in the middle of Brown’s regular dressing procedure. 
 
 Over four days, Nickerson, Moakley and Baker witnessed the commitment of dozens of health workers and body-retrieval teams. “Sometimes, we would be waiting to get access to someone and we’d be chatting to other people with incredible stories,” says the photographer. “It just never stopped. Their stories really touch you—the self-sacrifices that people are making. They are doing such a brilliant job.” 
 
 In the U.S., meanwhile, Schutmaat was meeting with Dr. Kent Brantly. The 33-year-old physician with Samaritan’s Purse was the first American citizen to be diagnosed with Ebola while working in Monrovia. “Kent was doing a lot of hard, selfless work to help people out,” says Schutmaat.“I met him at his church in Fort Worth, Texas. TIME’s photo editors and I felt that since he was a man of faith and since he was guided by that faith, it would be good to photograph him in there.” 
 
 Schutmaat had no idea then that it would be featured as part of the magazine’s Person of the Year franchise. “I just thought I was doing a big story on Ebola that would end up somewhere inside the magazine,” he says. “I didn’t think it would be such a huge deal.” 
 
 Nickerson was similarly in the dark: “Kira Pollack had said it could be an important story, and I knew that Person of the Year happened around this time of the year, but I didn’t dare to hope because I think there had always been people of status on the cover, and I couldn’t believe it was going to be a non-famous, African doctor on the cover.” 
 
 It was only when TIME’s photo editors ordered the final, high-resolution images that both photographers found out the real purpose of their work. “It’s probably the biggest privilege of my professional career,” says Nickerson. “There’s no question about it. Doing this whole story was a privilege.” 
 
 “I’m honored,” adds Schutmaat. “And to know that the editors at TIME would think that my photos would stand up next to Nickerson’s is pretty awesome.” A sentiment Nickerson reciprocates. “Bryan’s a great photographer. I love his work. I’m really happy to be sharing this story with him.” 
 
 Jackie Nickerson is a fine-art photographer based in Dublin, Ireland. She is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery . TIME last featured her work, Terrain , on LightBox . 
 
 Bryan Schutmaat is a Austin-based photographer. He is represented by Sasha Wolf Gallery . 
 
 Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent. Paul Moakley , TIME's deputy director of photography, and Natalie Matutschovsky , a senior photo editor at TIME, edited this photo essay. ||||| When the old warrior died, in a Washington hospital in 1979, his legacy of stubborn resistance and noble failure defined the Kurds as the region’s hard-luck heroes, earnest and worthy but doomed to remain the world’s largest ethnic group without a nation of its own. 
 
 The first time Barzani visited the White House, back in 2005, he was dressed, as usual, in a baggy jumpsuit gathered under a cummerbund just below the chest, epaulets and a red-and-white scarf whorled into a squarish turban. It’s the traditional garb of Kurdish males, including Barzani’s father Mustafa, the most famous Kurd since the 12th century general Saladin. A revolutionary who fought for 60 years to create a Kurdish state, Mustafa succeeded for only a year and change in 1946, just long enough for Massoud to be born within its confines. Then its land was reclaimed by Iran, and Mustafa’s soldiers returned to their struggle for independence. 
 
 Yet in one of those countries, the Kurds have built themselves a state in all but name. Far to the north of Baghdad, where Iraq’s deserts rise into stony foothills and then into mountains, the Kurdistan Regional Government holds sway. The young statelet has its own army, legislature, border checkpoints, foreign policy and, in Massoud Barzani, a powerful President whose life encapsulates the history of a people whose time finally appears to have come. 
 
 The other is on yellow-red-and-green flags Kurds sometimes wave in the countries where they actually reside (according to maps sold everywhere else in the world). 
 
 What does it say that the most reliable U.S. ally in its campaign against ISIS is an imaginary country? Kurdistan—Land of the Kurds—exists only in two spheres. One is on maps sold in bazaars wherever the Kurdish language is spoken. 
 
 The legacy of Massoud Barzani, now 68, is still being written. But as the hordes from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) swarmed north from Fallujah in the first days of June, conquering Iraq’s second largest city in four days and then pivoting toward Kurdish lands, one thing was clear: Iraq’s Kurds—and the perhaps 22 million other Kurds around the region—were at a turning point. In many ways, Iraqi Kurdistan was stronger than it had ever been before, with a functioning military and an economy that saw GDP per capita soar from $800 to $5,600 over the past 10 years. All that was suddenly at risk. Kurds are Muslims, and overwhelmingly Sunni at that, but of a tolerant tradition that draws the wrath of the fundamentalists who make up ISIS. On a front stretching 600 miles (965 km), the peshmerga, as the Kurds’ fighters are known, at first were pushed back, outgunned by the well-armed extremists. Not until Aug. 6, when ISIS artillery was arrayed just 30 miles (48 km) from his capital of Erbil, did Barzani issue the order to “fight the terrorists to the last breath.” By then, the Pentagon had his back. U.S. air strikes began the next day, a month before President Barack Obama announced a strategy designed to defeat ISIS. 
 
 On the ground, the stakes are even higher. Barzani, the leader of a stateless people, now stands in a position to decide the future of Iraq and with it, perhaps, that of the Middle East. He has spent his entire life navigating its fault lines. He left school to take up arms at age 16 yet speaks Arabic and Farsi as well as Kurdish and understands English. His clothes reflect a traditional, even feudal approach to power that grates on reformists. The Kurdistan Regional Government’s Prime Minister is a nephew, its intelligence chief is Barzani’s son—a fact not lost on ordinary Kurds in Iraq, who in impromptu interviews decline to provide their last names even when praising their leader. “Barzani is criticized by his opponents as a tribal man, but that is the important thing: it guarantees survival,” says Ayub Nuri, the Toronto-based editor of the Kurdish news site Rudaw. “The tribal man knows how to keep things together. Besides, it’s a tribal society.” 
 
 Barzani is criticized by his opponents as a tribal man, but that is the important thing: It guarantees survival. 
 
 And in many ways things have been going well. Iraq’s Kurds have enjoyed autonomy since 1991, when U.S. President George H.W. Bush ordered a no-fly zone over their land to keep out Saddam Hussein’s forces, who had killed tens of thousands of people. In the decade of turmoil that followed the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, Barzani’s government grew bolder as Baghdad grew weaker. And with this year’s crisis, the Iraqi Kurds crossed a new threshold. When Iraq’s uniformed forces beat a panicked retreat from ISIS, Barzani ordered his peshmerga to take Kirkuk, an oil-rich city that Kurds have long regarded as their own but have not been allowed to control, because it is also claimed by Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. The takeover saved Kirkuk from ISIS—though Baghdad now faces the challenge of getting it back from the Kurds. 
 
 Under new Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi—and with the help of U.S. air strikes—Baghdad has managed to rally against ISIS. But it is still the Kurds who are doing much of the fighting against the jihadists, which is appropriate—their goals couldn’t be more different. What ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi seeks to establish is a caliphate, a supranational body that claims dominion over all the world’s Muslims. It’s a system of governance that would sweep away borders and erase the nation-state—and a nation of their own is exactly what Barzani and his people ardently desire. Two days after al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself Caliph Ibrahim on June 29, Barzani announced that Iraqi Kurds would vote “within months” in a referendum on independence. “From now on, we won’t hide that that’s our goal,” he said. 
 
 The paradox is that a new Kurdish state could prove as destabilizing to the Middle East as an ISIS victory. Besides roiling Kurdish populations beyond Iraq, redrawing borders risks further undermining the shaky sovereignty of Syria, Libya and Yemen. For now, though, the Kurds seem willing to use their leverage to improve their position within a still existing Iraq, delaying once again the push for independence. On Dec. 2, Barzani approved a pact with the new Iraqi government that ties the Kurds more closely to Baghdad, papering over a rift that began when Barzani stopped sending oil south. 
 
 The deal was pushed strongly by the U.S., and it illustrates both the constraints facing Barzani’s government and his talent for navigating them. Iraq’s Kurdish leadership has a history as rough as its geography, with a people spread among four adjoining nations. They’ve been betrayed by the international community repeatedly in the past, but they now count among their allies not only the U.S. but also Israel and Iran. Barzani has even made a friend of Turkey, home to roughly half the world’s perhaps 30 million Kurds—all of whom Ankara has long regarded as a threat to the country’s sovereignty. But Turkey has gradually come to see Iraqi Kurdistan as a valuable market, doing roughly $8 billion in business there annually. In September 2012, Barzani cemented an alliance with Ankara by addressing the convention of Turkey’s ruling party. (For that, he wore a suit and tie.) Two years later, he reached across factional lines to reinforce the Syrian Kurds defending Kobani, the border town that became the showcase for the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS. 
 
 “When I was a kid,” says Nuri, the news-site editor, “it was forbidden in our house to say anything critical of his father. It’s not a blind love. We need a leader.” 
 
 Massoud Barzani inherited the title by birth, and by dint of his partnership with the U.S., he may end up filling the role for more than just his own people. 
 
 Read more: 
 
 TIME’s 2014 Person of the Year: The Ebola Fighters 
 
 Why the Ebola Fighters Are TIME’s Person of the Year 2014 
 
 Runner-Up: Ferguson Protesters, The Activists 
 
 Runner-Up: Vladimir Putin, The Imperialist 
 
 Runner-Up: Jack Ma, The Capitalist ||||| By Alex Altman / St. Louis Painting by Titus Kaphar for TIME At the beginning, they just wanted to pay tribute. Neighbors stood on cracked sidewalks behind yellow police tape, watching the dead teen’s body bake for hours in the summer heat. They tried to scrub his blood from the pavement with soap. It was Johnetta Elzie’s first protest. She didn’t expect the cops to show up to a candlelight vigil with canine units and riot gear. Crowds filled the streets that night. The next day they did it again. Elzie, 25, had been getting ready to return to college but kept coming back instead. She chanted and marched, dodged plumes of tear gas, took a rubber bullet to her left collarbone. And she tapped out tweets to tell the world what was happening in an obscure township in Middle America. “I was just hoping someone would care,” she says. An unarmed black man shot dead by a white cop is a tragedy, but a recurring one; the uproar can fizzle as fast as it flares. There was no reason to think Michael Brown’s death on Aug. 9 was destined to be different. But Ferguson was the spark that started a fire. Demonstrators couldn’t win the indictment of Darren Wilson, the police officer who fired the fatal shots. Yet they built a movement that revived a dormant national conversation about race and justice. “We made the world pay attention,” Elzie says. That was a triumph all its own. 
 
 Read More: Behind the Person of the Year Images) Events that might once have slipped by unnoticed coalesced into points on a troubling graph. In late November, protesters took to the streets in Cleveland after police killed Tamir Rice, a black 12-year-old, within seconds of encountering him with what turned out to be a toy pistol in his hand. Less than two weeks later, protests cascaded across the nation when a New York City grand jury declined to indict the white police officer who choked Eric Garner, leading to the death of the unarmed black father of six suspected of selling loose cigarettes. The street chants and hashtags that started in Ferguson knit these isolated tragedies into an inescapable story line. “This is not a black-and-white issue,” said Garner’s daughter Erica. “This is a national crisis.” 
 
 Protest is a performance that can make the unseen visible. In this angry epic, thousands found a role. They clogged freeways in Miami and Chicago, carried coffins across the Brooklyn Bridge, clashed with cops in Berkeley, Calif., flooded streets in London and toted signs around Tokyo. At colleges from Boston to Baton Rouge, students staged “die-ins” to dramatize the social value of black life. Players for the St. Louis Rams took the field with their hands raised in solidarity—a gesture repeated on the floor of Congress. A black President who so often seems reluctant to talk about race was forced into the fray. Barack Obama brought young Ferguson protest leaders into the Oval Office and announced measures meant to increase police accountability. Republican Senator Rand Paul criticized the disproportionate incarceration rate of African Americans and called for criminal-justice reform. “People need to know,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio after the Garner grand jury decision, “that black lives and brown lives matter as much as white lives.” This outcry was better focused than Occupy, bigger than the one that followed the Trayvon Martin case. But like the reaction to Martin, it felt raw and real. The expressions of powerlessness that began on a Missouri sidewalk soon seeded the hopes of the powerful. “What happened in Ferguson,” Attorney General Eric Holder tells TIME, “could be one of those seminal moments that transform the nation.” The Making of an Uprising Ferguson has a legacy of racial division. In the 1940s and ’50s, it was practically an all-white “sundown town,” where a chain blocked the main street from the adjacent black suburb. Two decades of white flight tipped the balance, and Ferguson is now about 70% black, with both rambling Victorian homes and low-income apartments like the dun-colored buildings that front the curving street where Brown was killed. Longtime white residents were largely oblivious to the tension bubbling beneath the city’s surface. “We’re having trouble understanding what the protesters want,” says former mayor Brian Fletcher. “They say they hate the police now, but I never heard about any racial problems, even from our African-American officials.” Yet statistics reveal a pattern of racial profiling that incensed residents long before local police killed an unarmed man and greeted his mourners with military-grade weaponry. “What made Ferguson was the police response,” says St. Louis alderman Antonio French, a community leader who helped keep the peace. “Every opportunity in those first 48 hours to be compassionate, they escalated the situation instead.” The protesters had a role in that too. Some, like Dhoruba Shakur, a 24-year-old jazz drummer in a Black Souljahz hoodie, saw in Brown’s death and the police reaction a justification for lawlessness. “It was kind of beautiful,” he says of the looting. “These people are being failed by the U.S. government.” The ambiguities of the case did little to ease the sense of injustice that fueled the clashes. Brown had stolen cigarillos and started a scuffle with a cop. Reams of grand jury testimony offered no definitive version of what went down in those two or three fateful minutes on Canfield Drive. None of that erased the fact that an unarmed black man had been killed by a white cop. But to many, it was hard to square the anger with the Molotov cocktails whistling through the night, the small businesses destroyed, the images of torched cop cars. Police perform a service that is difficult and dangerous; now they were being asked to maintain order in a hostile community where any wrong move would instantly inflame. The demonstrations divided the country into warring camps: Did blame rest with the officers pumping tear gas into the streets or the protesters who provoked them? 
 
 When the chaos subsided and the television trucks scattered, the work of sustaining the struggle fell to activists like Elzie. They are poets and paralegals, college students and working professionals, some affluent, some unemployed, white as well as black. They launched crowdfunding campaigns, organized council meetings and held a mock trial for St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch at the courthouse where Dred Scott once sued for his freedom. They continue to preach morning and night on Twitter, the revolutionary’s pocket pulpit. Some of these leaders are from outside St. Louis, like DeRay Mckesson, 29, an educator from Minneapolis. In August, after watching the first wave of protests from afar, he decided to take a week’s vacation and drive nine hours to join in. He knew no one when he arrived. Now he and Elzie run a movement newsletter devoured daily by 11,000 people. “We will not be silent anymore in the face of oppression,” he says. “Silence can so easily look like comfort.” ||||| Dr. Kent Brantly, 33 Physician with Samaritan’s Purse Bryan Schutmaat for TIME I’ve thought a lot about the moment when I was infected with Ebola. I will never know for certain when it happened, but I do remember one overnight shift, about nine days before I got sick, a woman came into the ER with her daughter. When I went to check on her, she was very sick. At one point, the daughter took her mother into the bathroom because she had diarrhea. We needed to get her out of the ER and into our Ebola treatment unit, but her daughter was incredibly distrustful of the situation and of us. I had to counsel her extensively to reassure her that we were trying to do what was best for her mother. To have that conversation, I took off my mask, gloves and apron. I probably held her hands or put my arm around her shoulder, as I often do. I don’t think I was infected by her mother, but since the daughter had taken her to the bathroom, there’s a chance she didn’t wash her hands after helping her mom. The mother died by the morning, and a postmortem test showed she did indeed have Ebola. A little more than a week later, I woke up feeling a little warm. My temperature was 100.0—higher than normal but not too concerning. I took a rapid malaria test; it was negative—not a good sign. I called our team leader, who sent physician colleagues to my home in full protective gear. After two more negative malaria tests, I knew I would be in isolation for at least three more days. In the meantime, I grew sicker. My fever hit 104.9. We all hoped it could be dengue fever. On the fourth day the team leader came to my bedroom window with news. “Kent, buddy, we have your results. It’s positive for Ebola.” I didn’t know what to think. I just asked, “So what’s our plan?” This was July, and I’d been in Monrovia since October 2013. The first time I heard about the Ebola outbreak was at the end of March 2014, at a picnic for expatriates living in the area. Someone asked if I had heard about the outbreak in Guinea. I had not, but within a couple of months I was one of only two doctors in Monrovia treating Ebola patients—and at that point we had only one survivor. My wife Amber and I were both at the disadvantage of knowing how this illness can end. But even with the bad news, I felt strangely at peace. God blessed me with a peace that surpasses understanding. At some point, I was told about an experimental drug called ZMapp. It had worked on monkeys but had never been tested in humans. I agreed to receive it but decided that Nancy Writebol, a medical aide I worked with, should get it first, since she was sicker. I wasn’t trying to be a hero; I was making a rational decision as a doctor. Over the next couple of days, though, my condition worsened. The doctor decided to give me the drug too, and within an hour my body stabilized a bit. It was enough improvement for me to be safely evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Shortly after I arrived at Emory, Amber called me from a phone outside my room. I don’t really remember that conversation, I was so delirious, but she said to me, “We watched you walk off that ambulance.” I said, “You were watching me?” and she said, “Oh, Kent. The whole world was watching you.” I’ve had time to reflect on what happened to me. Am I the same person I was before Ebola? In a lot of ways, yes. I don’t live every moment with a conscious awareness of what I’ve been through. I still have the same flaws I did before. But I think whenever we go through a devastating experience, it’s not about there being some inherent redemptive narrative, but it is an incredible opportunity for the redemption of something. We can say, “How can I be better now because of what I’ve been through?” To not do that is kind of a shame. When I thank God for saving my life, I am not unique in that. If you watch videos of survivors in Liberia, so many of them thank God for saving their lives. I chose a career in medicine because I wanted a tangible skill with which to serve people. And so my role as a physician is my attempt to do that. I’ll probably get tired of talking about my experience some day, but I went to Liberia because I long felt it was my vocation to spend my career as medical missionary. Deep in the core of my heart, I still think that’s my calling. I don’t want to go on with life and forget this.—as told to Alexandra Sifferlin 
 
 Dr. Jerry Brown, 46 Medical director and general surgeon at the Eternal Love Winning Africa [ELWA] Hospital in Monrovia and director of the ELWA 2 Ebola treatment center Jackie Nickerson for TIME I first heard about Ebola in March, when I was listening to the radio. That was late March. We had patients with Ebola presenting in Lofa County. In the counties that border with Guinea. So it was then that we really started panicking and thinking, Now that one of our counties is involved, what next? Sooner or later it might reach us, we thought. So from then on we started thinking about Ebola. The very first challenge I had as medical director at that time was that if we started having Ebola patients show up in our emergency room, well, “Where do we keep them, doctor?” The only place that came through my mind was our chapel, because we didn’t have the financial capability to construct something. Our intent was not to create a treatment unit but instead to transform the chapel into a holding unit such that whenever we had a patient in the emergency room and we had the suspicion of the person being a probable or suspected case, the person could be kept in the holding unit until the patient would be transported or transferred to the treatment unit. So that was our goal for having the chapel used initially. It was June 12, in the late evening after surgery. I had just left the OR when I saw a series of missed calls on the phone [from the Deputy Minister of Health] and decided to call her back. She said, “There are two patients that we have, they are Sierra Leoneans, and they visited one of the hospitals already, Redemption Hospital. A couple of their staff have already encountered them. But their presentation, their signs and symptoms, and from where they have traveled, tell me that they are probable cases and they most likely have Ebola. And the only place I thought about that we could keep them until we can have an investigation done is at your center.” The very first thing I felt was, this is going to be challenging to have those patients brought here. We had not attended to such patients before, so in the back of my mind I kept thinking, What would it be like, to have those patients here? From that day onward, I always had the fear of myself or one of my staff getting infected, and what would become of me thereafter. The first two patients were brought in an ambulance, with two of their relatives, in the back of the ambulance, along with the patients. The front of the ambulance had the driver and two health workers; one nurse and one physician assistant. What was shocking was that the nurse and the physician assistant never had any personal protective equipment. The only thing they had was gloves, and dressed in their ordinary scrubs. That was frightening. The two patients in the back of the ambulance, one had died on the way. And the other was lying there. And then a boy about the age of 13 and his brother, maybe around his late 20s, were both in the back of the ambulance. We could tell that they were Sierra Leoneans by their accents and the way they spoke. We were shocked. First question was why the health workers allowed the patients’ caregiver to ride in the ambulance with them. It all boils down to people not knowing what a disease Ebola actually was. So no one knew what was happening. And I tell you, if we had not done some training initially, and spoke about Ebola repeatedly during our regular devotions, it would have been a greater disaster in the ELWA hospital. Through the training a few persons had some knowledge of what Ebola was all about: the mode of transportation, the means of prevention and the signs and symptoms related to the disease. So the bulk of the workers at this institution knew a lot about it. So it was a pity to see those workers in the ambulance dressed as they were. One of them is said to have died of the disease later, the nurse. So initially, that is the situation we had. Dr. Kent Brantly and Dr. Debbie Eisenhut were the first two who were willing to dress in full PPE and took the patient down to the unit. It was very challenging to get the nurses on board the first day, though they had been trained. The patient died a few days later. Before the end of June, the chapel, where we only had six beds, could no longer take additional patients because it was full to capacity. The initial intent of the unit in the chapel soon changed from a holding unit to a treatment unit. The chapel then became the first treatment unit in Monrovia. So all the patients that were presenting with the symptoms [of Ebola] were all rushed here, to the chapel. [They] were dying every three, four, five days. Because of the rapid rate at which people were dying, you could easily find places to put someone else. By then the government in the middle of July created another ETU at JFK Hospital that became the second unit in Monserrado County, in Monrovia. When the chapel became full and we could no longer take additional patients, and more people were getting ill and dying, the ELWA management decided to turn over our newly built kitchen and laundry for the new hospital under construction to be transformed into a treatment unit. Thus ELWA 2. Within a week it was filled. We had 20 beds. Within one week we had more than 20 patients. Patients were now in the corridors and under the eaves of the building, and still patients kept pouring in daily. The outpatient department of the hospital was then turned over to be used as an extension of the unit, shutting down outpatient services to the public. When it all started, and we had a unit set up, my wife did warn me not to enter the unit. So the first time I did enter I didn’t tell her I had entered. But she knew I had been trained. I went home and said nothing to her. And the very first time she had a suspicion of me going to the unit was when Dr. Abraham Borbor, who was one of my mentors, got ill. And I had to go in and attend to him. I had been in the unit for two weeks without her knowing. And I went home one evening and started discussing a few things about Dr. Borbor. Borbor was my role model, especially when I was in medical school. How he was now ill, and how I was feeling so sorry for him, and how his condition was not improving despite what we were doing. And she paused, and asked, “You are not working in the unit. How do you know these things?” and I caught myself. And tried to change the topic. It went to something else, and she never noticed. But then she started having suspicions. I remember her saying, “I hope you are not being stubborn. I told you not to go to the ETU.” So I said, “Well, I will do my best.” I formed some excuse and we just abandoned the topic. A few days later she noticed changes in the color of my boxers from the bleach or chlorine solution used for disinfection when leaving the unit. And so she said, “Ah, what is this?” and so I had no option but to finally confess. It did not go down well with her. I apologized, and we kind of talked about it for some time, and then she accepted. What she said was, “I can’t stop you. I realize this is something you like, so I am not going to stop you. But just be careful. So when you are back home, change all your clothes in the garage before you enter the house. I do not want my children and I to get infected.” But before she said this, I never took any of my outfits back home. I had special scrubs that I kept at the hospital. Once I got to the hospital I changed completely into my scrubs. At the end of each work day, I changed back to my ordinary wear and went back home. It was challenging to have her to accept this. She was afraid of me getting infected. She later realized that I was safe, and we kept trusting God to remain safe prayerfully. —as told to Aryn Baker 
 
 Dr. Mosoka Fallah, 44 An American-educated Liberian infectious-disease expert who returned to his country last year to help establish a school of public health and now leads the effort to find, monitor and isolate the contacts of Ebola victims Jackie Nickerson for TIME As an infectious-disease student [at Harvard] I studied emerging and re-emerging infectious disease, and Ebola was always what we were talking about. At the time I had come back to Liberia to work on a USAID project. It was March. Ebola was the only thing on my mind. It was already in Guinea. I understood the interaction between the people on the border, between Guinea and Liberia. And I knew that there was definitely going to be Ebola coming to Liberia. It was one thing reading about a disease and then being in a disease. Maybe I could have raised the alarm, but I didn’t. I regret that now. I regret that we didn’t stop it in Guinea. Then the cases came to Liberia from Guinea. It was March, the 24th or 25th. I called [Assistant Health Minister] Mr. Tolbert Nyenswah: “I’m hearing about this Ebola, how can I help?” Everyone was coming in and thinking about how to mount an effective response. It was a task force. It became much more personal for me, because one of the relatives of the [first person to be killed in the outbreak] in Lofa County had taken a taxi to Monrovia. And she slept in the Chicken Soup Factory [neighborhood]. I grew up there. My mom is there, all of my relatives are there. I said, “We’ve got to get our boots on the ground. We’ve got to go to Chicken Soup Factory.” And they said to me, “This is the task force. We construct policies and strategy.” And I said, “O.K., I’m going to go down to the county [level] where we can discuss boots on the ground.” I led a team to Chicken Soup Factory. The index case had already left. But there were contacts like the taxi driver. I talked to him. He was frightened. He said, “I tried to help this old lady. If I do have the disease, I am going to spread it.” We told the townspeople to keep an eye on him. [We said], “Don’t stigmatize him. Don’t let him on the street.” Our contacts officer would go and take his temperature every day. And after 21 days, he did not come down with the disease. That case had me running around recruiting and training people. And passing awareness. Then [in] April we saw the situation slow down, the number of cases drop. By the end of April, we weren’t getting any more cases. But I was a little bit worried. Given the fluid nature of our borders and the nature of Ebola, I was worried. I remember sending an email to a friend. “Very soon it will be in Liberia again,” I said, thinking of the increasing cases in Sierra Leone. Because when it hit Sierra Leone, it hit with so much force and ferocity. The cases mounted at an alarming rate. I didn’t know that was prophetic when I wrote that line to my friend. On June 27 we had a new case. I got a call from the Ministry of Health. And it was in New Kru Town [one of Monrovia’s most crowded slums]. The population density and the denial allowed the disease to escalate. A landlady we approached [to do contact tracing] said, “If anyone says they have Ebola in this house, I will give you a slap.” I just walked out. There was so much resistance, so much denial. As we tracked case by case, we got to know that the first index patient who died had gone to Redemption Hospital. He had come into contact with all the nurses. So we had to consider every nurse and doctor at Redemption a possible contact. Actually, I followed about 45 people that were listed as contacts. This nurse, Esther, had touched him, and she became infected. And Dr. Sam [Samuel Muhumuza Mutooro] from Uganda—he treated him, and he became infected. And then the man who took the index patient in the back of his car died, and the sister died. What we knew was only the tip of the iceberg. Even before the ambulance had gone [to take the first case for treatment], six people had died. There is a communal bathroom that all the houses use. It just blew our minds. All of a sudden we have this situation in New Kru Town, of all places. We were worried that very soon it would spread to West Point [another congested slum]. I was working to mobilize tracers, to train tracers. And there were contacts that we could not find. Contacts were becoming symptomatic and moving and exposing other contacts. Twenty-six people got infected by one person. And then the cases hit us so hard. We had contacts everywhere becoming symptomatic and generating more contacts. That’s when the tension was on. Seven days a week, 10 hours a day. And we were getting from 50 to 200 phone calls. The phone calls would come until midnight and start at 5 a.m. I couldn’t afford to turn the phone off. All through Ebola, I think I turned it off once or twice, and only when a friend said to me, “Go and rest. You look like a dead body right now. We don’t want you around reminding us of death.” And I slept for two days. Very soon I realized that the response is not a single piece. It has to be holistic. There has to be enough ambulances. There has to be enough case investigation teams. There has to be enough burial teams. The sick will be waiting for someone to die [in the Ebola treatment centers] so we can have space. Everything we did on Ebola was dependent on the ETUs [Ebola treatment units]. And we didn’t have enough. August and July were quite tough for us. People would die, and we were helpless. We just couldn’t do anything. I would have a contact tracer follow a family. The mother died. The sister died. The maid died. The wife died. The father died. And she [the contact tracer] would go there every day to do contact tracing on the symptomatic people. She would encourage them, but every time she came back, there would be one more body. We were left alone. I have to say that. I always say that in July and August we lost a good window of opportunity. If they had come in with the ambulances and the tents, we could have averted a lot of death. If everyone had rushed in and built another [treatment unit]. They took such a long time to be built. Meanwhile, people were dying. The bodies would accumulate in the street. The burial teams would go someplace for burial and they would be chased out. I was always afraid that Ebola would be in West Point. The unsanitary conditions. The population density. The fluid nature of the population. It was Aug. 12 that I got a call. [A volunteer] called me and said, “Mosoka, you better come to West Point.” He said, “There is one dead in the house with the door locked. And the other is sick and vomiting and toileting in the street.” I left everything and I ran to West Point. Nobody wanted to talk, nobody wanted to explain what was happening. I called a couple of leaders [from West Point], and they began to reveal to us that for the past two weeks there had been massive secret burial going on. They would take [the bodies] to an island across the bay and they would bury them. There was no investigation or contact tracing. That night I called the WHO Country Representative. I said, “Our worst nightmare has happened. West Point has Ebola.” The decision to open a [Ebola] holding center in West Point was a desperate decision. West Point is congested. There is no way you can walk in West Point without touching. You have the sick walking around, vomiting and toileting. I said, “The best we can do for West Point is to get the sick from the population.” The community didn’t understand. And then it was Aug. 19, the worst day of my life. It was a rainy day. That day alone we took six dead bodies from West Point. I think there was a lot of misinformation. There was still a lot of denial. And then [rioters] broke into the West Point [Ebola] center. They took mattresses. Where were those contacts? Where did they take the mattresses? There was a very big panic. The government had to deal with people running around with infected mattresses. They also knew that they had the secret burials. So the government quarantined West Point. Later, the government lifted the quarantine. The lesson we have to learn is that the government, before taking action, should consult with the community. I’m cautious about the declining number of cases because with Ebola, a single case is an epidemic. Before we were fighting a big war. Now it’s a guerrilla war and we’re fighting little pockets. If it comes back, it’s going to be even more intense. It only takes one case, and then all our achievements are reversed. On Tuesday, Nov. 11, we got a call that a prayer leader had died from Ebola. Thursday morning, they brought a casket to carry the body. There were people there rubbing oil on her and praying for her. Forty people. Children as young as 3, 4. All of them under a tent. So as I speak to you, three of the people that were in that room are in the [treatment unit] today. This is in New Kru Town, where it all started. That’s what I am trying to say. It came back. —as told to Aryn Baker 
 
 Dr. Philip Ireland, 44 Liberian doctor at John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia, Liberia’s largest hospital Jackie Nickerson for TIME We had several cases of clinicians at the John F. Kennedy hospital who have come down with Ebola. Dr. [Samuel] Brisbane [and] physician’s assistant Stephen Vincent. And then I came down next. It was in a meeting [on July 24] when I had this splitting headache. I saw flashes of lightning. I have never had a headache like this in my entire life. And I knew something was very, very wrong. I did my temperature; it was 38.1 Centigrade [100.58 Fahrenheit]. And I said this sounds like, smells like Ebola. This can’t be malaria because I’ve had malaria a thousand times. And I know how it is. This is completely different. I called the chief medical officer, told him I wasn’t feeling so well. I told him, “Doc, I think I have been exposed to Ebola, and I want to be tested.” And he was instrumental on the next day to have me tested. The guy came in the house dressed in the entire space suit, into my room. They did the test. The next day we found out that I was Ebola positive. By day seven I could not feel my radial pulse. I was in early shock. I was really sick. Very, very ill. My colleagues said that if we don’t get him out of here [his home] today, he’s going to pass. And I felt that way for the first time on day seven. I felt I was in shock. If I didn’t get IV lines going I was probably going to die that day. So my fellow doctors, a pediatric resident at the hospital, and an ob-gyn resident, and also my wife and her brother, all of them were calling to see if they could get an ambulance. But in Monrovia there were no ambulances [available] at the time. So they found this ambulance that was having some parts replaced at a garage. They were repairing the breaks. And [one of the doctors] literally sat there and waited until this ambulance was repaired and brought to the house. Then we got to the hospital, to the Ebola treatment unit. I collapsed on the bed and passed out. I woke up and found out that they have given me three liters of IV fluids, saline. And I felt a little better. That night was the worst night at ETU. I had 46 episodes of diarrhea and 26 episodes of vomiting. I was in a sea of mess. The next day there was this physician’s assistant—I will never forget him. His act of love towards me, to wash me, was so much so that I will never forget it in my entire life. He cleaned me totally. He dressed me, put me in a clean bed. And I felt that was so, so, so nice. I really appreciated that. I felt so relieved. The very first night I woke up to some loud music. They had turned the SUV around and opened the doors and turned the music up very loud. Gospel music. And all the artists were singing, “You’re going to make it, you’re not going to die.” At that time I already had headaches; I felt like a nightmare. Like you had the speakers right [next] to my windows and boom, boom, boom. And then they had a mixture of different kind of people, like some people were in there with fever or malaria. We weren’t all Ebola patients. Some people had strength, and those who had the strength will have prayer services of what we call vigils. And there was singing and praise God the entire night. They were singing and praying the entire night. And that was tiring. They would sing and pray the entire night. After one night of that, [two infected doctors] said, “No, no more praying to God. If you want to talk to God, do it silently in your heart.” So they stopped the vigils. By day three, the morning of day three, I started to do some terrible, terrible hiccups [a symptom of advanced Ebola]. That was when the clinicians taking care of me thought I was going to die. And they communicated that with one another. In fact, at one time I was hiccupping with every breath. So they thought I wasn’t going make it. They were even discussing whether I would be cremated or buried. And the news circulated that selfsame day that I had passed. I was in bad shape at that time. But after that day, day four in the ETU, I started to get better. When they came in to check on me the next morning they met me standing. And they were very surprised. I stayed there getting better, getting better. I was actually in the Ebola Treatment Unit for 14 days. And by day 10 in that place, which was like 17 days of illness, I was feeling much better. There was no more diarrhea, I didn’t have fever. Now I did have complications. I had pneumonia, I had hallucinations of all kinds of different things. Besides the acute renal failure. So by day 17 I was much better. So the guy did another test and the test results came back negative. And then came day 14 [in the ETU]. I was told 20 minutes before I left the Ebola Center that I would leave the Ebola Center. They said, “Dr. Ireland, you have to take a chlorine bath.” And I said, “Is the water warm or hot?” And they said, “No, it’s cold.” And then I said, “I’m staying. I’m not going anywhere.” Where I was, you have mosquitoes flying all over the place and cockroaches. So I said, man, let me get out of here. So in the evening I mustered up enough courage to do the cold chlorine water bath. They had me strip in front of all the nurses and the physician’s assistants. And the male physician’s assistant had to ask them to leave to give me some privacy. I had two buckets of the chlorine water. Very cold, icy water. And then I put on this T-shirt, sweatpants. And I had to go to the spray where I got sprayed thoroughly. In my ears, in my face, with my clothes on. When I left I was so wet. I was drenched with chlorine water. And I came outside. Now you have to bear in mind I am very, very fragile and weak. I’m still sick. I’m just glad I made it, that’s all. And I walk out and there are people singing all around me. The nurses were singing with their beautiful—they were singing and so happy. I was being released at the same time as a nurse. Nurse Barbara. And we had people from JFK there, my family, my elder brother was there, my wife was there. We had a lot of other doctors that were there. We had members of the press. A lot of people had turned out. And I felt like Nelson Mandela. I always use that description. It felt like the Long Walk to Freedom. And even though it was a short walk, for me, because the energy I had to expend because I was so weak, it was like a walk to freedom. And I walk up and I raised my hands to heaven, thanking God for saving my life. And then I noticed something also. There were a lot of crying people, people happy to see me. And when I got close to anybody, they actually backed away. —as told to Aryn Baker ||||| By Simon Shuster / Moscow Portrait by Pavel Sokov for TIME Right off the throne room in the Grand Kremlin Palace, the official residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, is a long corridor known as the Malachite foyer, where the walls are adorned with the portraits of Russian kings and conquerors. Yuri the Long-Armed, the warrior prince credited with founding Moscow in the 12th century, hangs across from Peter the Great, who had expanded the Russian empire to Europe’s Baltic Sea by the time he died in 1725. What they all had in common was a thirst for expansion, which over the years has made Russia the largest country in the world. And at least by that measure, Putin in 2014 has already earned his own portrait. His decision in March to invade and then annex the region of Crimea from Ukraine marked the first growth of Russia’s dominions since the fall of the Soviet Union. Though the West remembers that event as a victory for freedom, the Soviet collapse was a catastrophe to Putin and many of his compatriots. “Millions of Russians went to sleep in one country and awoke in another,” Putin said in a speech at the Kremlin palace in March. Overnight, it seemed, Russia was transformed from a superpower into a corrupt petrostate, a fallen empire that Sergey Brin, the Russian émigré turned Google co-founder, once derided as “Nigeria with snow.” (Read More: Behind the Person of the Year Images) 
 
 
 
 Even Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who tried to reform his country only to dismantle it in 1991, still broods over the loss. “Russia was simply pushed aside, pushed out of politics, made to feel like some kind of backwater,” he tells TIME in the Moscow office where he once received American dignitaries as equals if not exactly friends. “In everything it was America calling the shots!” But with the conquest of Crimea, a derelict peninsula about the size of Massachusetts, Putin at last restored a scrap of Russia’s honor, says Gorbachev, by “acting on his own,” unbound by the constraints of U.S. supremacy and the table manners of international law. 
 
 The vast majority of Russians would nod along. Putin’s approval ratings have skyrocketed since the annexation of Crimea, reaching a peak of 88% in October. Not since 2008, when Putin last defied the West by sending Russian tanks into neighboring Georgia, has he enjoyed such popularity at home. Not during the oil-fueled boom of his first two terms as President, from 2000 to 2008, when the economy grew by an average of 7% per year, nor during the multibillion-dollar spectacle of the Winter Olympics in Sochi that Putin hosted at the start of this year. For the gift of Crimea—a depressed region expected to cost Russia more than $18 billion over the next six years to develop—Russians seemed ready to deify Putin. Local critics fell silent, while thousands of supporters waited hours in Red Square to buy Putin souvenirs, like a T-shirt of him lounging on a beach, the caption declaring, crimea. That name, redolent with the history of Europe’s 19th century wars, has become a byword in Russia for national revival, a taste of the imperial glory that a generation of Russians have long hungered for. “It had been extremely painful,” says Lev Gudkov, a prominent Russian sociologist. “Only with the annexation of Crimea did people start to feel that our great-power status was restored.” For the first time since the Soviet collapse, he says, “the sense of frustration and humiliation dissipated.” The Empire Strikes Back The 62-year-old Putin has savored that validation. The son of a factory worker and a former military man from the slums of St. Petersburg—then called Leningrad—he spent the last years of the Soviet Union as a KGB agent trying to preserve the agency’s authority in the East German city of Dresden. The fall of the Berlin Wall came to him not as a liberation but as a threat—in 1989 a crowd of German protesters gathered outside his office to demand the ouster of the Soviet-backed regime. As the mob threatened to storm the building, Putin burned the KGB’s files and sent frantic requests for orders from his bosses in the capital. “Moscow is silent,” Putin later recalled in his official biography. 
 
 By the time he rose through the post-Soviet wreckage to become President in 2000, Putin had dedicated himself to rebuilding Russia’s lost authority. But his attempts this year to tighten Moscow’s grip on Ukraine came at a heavy price for Russia and the world. A passenger plane flying over the war zone in eastern Ukraine was blasted out of the sky on July 17, almost certainly by the ill-trained militias that Russia has been using to fight its battles. Nearly 300 people were killed, dozens of them children, as Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 disintegrated over territory that Russia effectively controls through its proxies. Putin blamed the Ukrainian government for the disaster, but the callous treatment of the dead—most of them Europeans—cost him many of the few friends he had left. Already expelled from the G-8 club of wealthy nations in March after the annexation of Crimea, Putin was further ostracized at the G-20 summit held in November in Australia, which lost 38 of its citizens on Flight MH17. Capturing the prevailing Western attitude at the international summit, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in greeting Putin, “I guess I’ll shake your hand, but I have only one thing to say to you: You need to get out of Ukraine.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed to be the only one willing to hear Putin out. She came on the first evening of the summit to the Hilton Brisbane, where the Kremlin entourage was staying, and spent the following six hours in closed-door talks with Putin over Ukraine. The next day, Putin left the conference early, before its final declaration was announced, while Merkel delivered a speech predicting a drawn-out confrontation with Moscow. “Russia flouted international law,” she said. “After the horrors of two world wars and the end of the Cold War, this calls the entire European peaceful order into question.” The Germans, the centrist pragmatists of Europe, stood on principle, issuing a rebuke that helped seal Russia’s political isolation just as a sharp drop in the price of oil weakened the country’s most valuable asset. Inflation in Russia has spiked as a result. The ruble has lost 40% of its value against the dollar since the start of the year, forcing Russians to cut back on Western goods and foreign travel. Next year the government expects a recession to take hold. The value of Russian government debt is approaching the level of junk bonds, and in early December, Putin was forced to cancel one of his legacy projects, the South Stream natural gas pipeline into Europe, whose construction contracts he had enjoyed negotiating personally. “If Europe doesn’t want to do this, well, then it means this won’t be done,” Putin said, referring to pressure from E.U. regulators. “We will steer the flow of our energy resources to other regions of the world.” 
 
 So, was Putin’s taste of empire worth the cost to Russian prosperity? For those who carry the grudges of Russian history, it was. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, America became a monopoly,” says Alexander Voloshin, a Kremlin insider who served as Putin’s chief of staff from 2000 to 2003. “They felt they had the right to punish and to praise, to give the carrot and smack with the stick,” he tells TIME. “There was no competition.” The Global Alternative
– "For tireless acts of courage and mercy, for buying the world time to boost its defenses, for risking, for persisting, for sacrificing and saving, the Ebola fighters are Time's 2014 Person of the Year." So concludes editor Nancy Gibbs' piece on why this year's honor goes to a group of people who have "the hero's heart," those who freely put themselves at risk in order to fight the virus. Time shares the stories of a few of the many, some in their own words (Kaci Hickox and Dr. Kent Brantly penned their own stories). One nurse's assistant who survived Ebola describes hurt "like they are busting your head with an ax"—though a hurt perhaps second to watching her parents die. "I went out of my mind for about one week," says Salome Karwah. Time ultimately photographed more than 20 Ebola fighters in a dozen locations around the globe for its story. In Gibbs' piece, she shifts from writing of how the fighters were tested to how we were all tested and, in many ways, failed: On our own soil, a "full freak-out" quickly ensued, with an Ohio school closed because an employee flew on the same plane (not flight) as one of Thomas Eric Duncan's nurses, and with a Maine teacher unable to return to her school for three weeks simply because she attended a conference in Dallas. "The problem with irrational responses is that they can cloud the need for rational ones"—which this honored group of men and women had. This year's runners-up: Ferguson protesters, Vladimir Putin, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, and Alibaba founder Jack Ma.