There are at least 12 known Arab countries in which non-Arab peoples—most commonly sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians—are owned and trafficked as slaves or are forced to labor in slave-like conditions:
- Algeria
- Egypt
- Iraq
- Kuwait
- Lebanon
- Libya
- Mauritania
- Oman
- Qatar
- Saudi Arabia
- Sudan
- United Arab Emirates
As the American Anti-Slavery Group reports:
Sub-Saharan Africans are enslaved in areas beyond Arab North Africa. The form this slavery takes is human trafficking, mainly of young women. Lured by advertisements of legitimate jobs overseas, desperately poor women, often from Nigeria and Uganda, are trafficked to Arab countries for use as prostitutes and household maids. Many young women are tricked into believing that the oil-rich Arab world holds the answer to their economic worries and fall into the traffickers’ traps.…
Not only Africans are enslaved in the Arab world. For decades, the Gulf states have imported—some say trafficked—massive numbers of migrant laborers, mainly from South Asia, in order to build their infrastructure and perform menial tasks. The resulting ratios of natives to migrants in these relatively lightly-populated countries is astonishing. For example, approximately 95% of Qatar’s labor force is foreign-born—more than two thirds of its population. And, as of 2015, more than 88% of the United Arab Emirates’ total population was made up of foreign-born laborers.
Exact estimates for the number of those trafficked are non-existent, but Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, the chair of Nigeria’s parliamentary Committee on Diaspora Affairs, announced in 2020 that some 80,000 Nigerian women had been trafficked as sex slaves across Lebanon, Mali, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E.
The estimates for enslaved black Africans and South Asian migrant workers are:
- Algeria: 84,000
- Libya: 47,000
- Mauritania: 149,000
- Qatar: 2 million
- Saudi Arabia: 740,000
- Sudan: 35,000
