The Shaggyeh (one of the few Arab tribes who did not rally to the Mahdi) drove Gordon to distraction, with Gordon writing in his diary about them: "Dreadful lot! How I look forward to their disbandment". Gordon had a low opinion of the Egyptian, Turkish and Arab Sudanese troops under his command-whom he constantly described as a mutinous, badly disciplined and ill-trained rabble good only for looting – but had a much higher opinion of his Black Sudanese soldiers, most of them former slaves who would rather die fighting as free men than live as slaves again; it was well known that the Mahdi's forces were going to enslave the Blacks of Khartoum once they took the city. The black Sudanese troops, many from what is now South Sudan, proved to be Gordon's best troops at Khartoum and numbered about twenty-three hundred.