Slave Raiding

Slave raiding is a military raid carried out for the purpose of capturing people and bringing them from the raid area to be held as slaves. Once a common feature of warfare, it is now widely considered a war crime, and it has occurred since antiquity, with some of the earliest surviving written records coming from Sumer in present day Iraq. It has been documented across a wide range of regions and periods, including Saracen raiding across the Mediterranean, Viking slave raids into Ireland that fed slave markets in Irish ports by the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the Crimean-Nogai raids, estimated to have supplied two to three million people into the Ottoman Empire over roughly four centuries, as well as raiding documented in West Africa, Southeast Asia, North America, Brazil and southern Africa.