slaves annually to their northern neighbors in exchange for spices and grains. After the Nubian kingdoms' fall in 1504, the Muslims conquered most of Nubia, while the Funj conquered much of modern-day Sudan from Darfur to Khartoum; the Funj began to use slaves in the army in the reign of Badi III (). Later, Egyptian slavers began raiding the area of southern Sudan. In particular, the ruler Muhammad Ali of Egypt attempted to build up an army of southern Sudanese slaves with the aid of the Nubian slavers. Attempts to ban slavery were later attempted by British colonial authorities in 1899, after their victory in the Mahdi War. According to British explorer and abolitionist Samuel Baker, who visited Khartoum in 1862, six decades after the British authorities had declared the slave trade illegal, slavery was the industry "that kept Khartoum going as a bustling town". Baker described the practice of slave raiding of villages to the south by Sudanese slavers from Khartoum: An armed group would sail up the Nile, find a convenient African village, surround it during night and attack just before dawn, burning huts and shooting. Women and young adults would be captured and bound with "forked poles on their shoulders", hand tied to the pole in front, children bound to their mothers. To render "the village so poor that surviving inhabitants would be forced to collaborate with slavers on their next excursion against neighboring villages," the village would be looted of cattle, grain, ivory, with everything else destroyed. Modern-day slavery The "modern wave" of slavery in Sudan reportedly began in 1983 with the Second Sudanese Civil War between the North and South. It involved large numbers of Sudanese people from the southern and central regions, "primarily the Dinka, Nuer and Nuba of central Sudan," being captured and sold "(or exploited in other ways)" by Northern Sudanese who consider themselves as Arabs. The problem of slavery reportedly became worse after the National Islamic Front-backed military government took power in 1989, the Khartoum government declared jihad against non-Muslim opposition in the south. The Baggara were also given freedom "to kill these groups, loot their wealth, capture slaves, expel the rest from the territories, and forcefully settle their lands." The Sudan Criminal Code of 1991 did not list slavery as a crime, but the Republic of Sudan has ratified the Slavery Convention, the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery,