The Baggara are a grouping of Arab ethnic groups inhabiting the portion of Africa's Sahel between Lake Chad and southern Kordofan. The Baggara are descended from Juhaynah Arab tribes who migrated to Sudan from the Arabian Peninsula or from North Africa, and they later intermarried with local Africans. The Baggara are Arabs only by virtue of their linguistic and cultural ties to the Arabs, as their Arab ancestry is very distant. The Baggara formed the backbone of the Mahdist Ansar during the Mahdist War of 1881-1899, and they were also armed by the Sudanese government during the Second Sudanese Civil War and the Darfur War with the goal of crushing the rebel groups in the southern parts of Sudan. In 2017, the world Baggara population was approximately 6,000,000, with at least 3,000,000 living in Darfur, 2,391,000+ in Chad, 289,000 in Nigeria, 171,000 in Cameroon, 150,000 in Niger, and 107,000 in the Central African Republic. They mostly practice Sunni Islam, with Sufism being a second religion. Most of them speak either Chadian Arabic or Sudanese Arabic.