Modern Tuareg have dark blue turbans to match their topcoats.
The sultan of Air is to a great extent dependent on the chiefs of the Tuareg tribes inhabiting a vast tract of the Sahara to the north-west.
The caravans from Kano were also frequently pillaged by the Tuareg, so that the prosperity of the town declined.
The Kabyles, Mzabites, Tuareg, Arabs and Moors all profess Mahommedanism, though it is only among the Arabs that its tenets are held in any purity.
The attempts at penetration into the extreme south, abandoned after the massacre by Tuareg of a mission sent in 1881, under Colonel Paul Flatters, to study the question of railway communication with Senegal, were begun again in 1890, in which year the British government recognized the western Sahara as within the French sphere.