The Nigerien Arab populations include groups drawn from the Shoa or Baggara Arabs, the first clans of whom are believed to have arrived in what is now Niger sometime in the 19th century. Small groups of the Ouled Sliman, overrunning the Kanem Empire, filtered into the area between the late 19th century and 1923, joining with those Shoa pastoralists who were already centered in Tintouma area. In the 1950s a small number of Kanem–Chadian Arabs moved into the area, but the population remained small.