It's A Salafi - Jihadist Insurgency, Stupid

[Dayuhan]

The way nature resolves such affairs is messy, of course.

The way people solve such affairs can be pretty messy too, especially when it involves shifting a lot of people into areas that are already occupied.

A start would be if the normal migration into cities was guided and accelerated a bit, in order to reduce the population in settlements. The share of the population in the desertifying regions which considers itself nomads could probably be enticed to a seasonal migration pattern, in order to reduce its presence in the problematic regions.

Either way, improving the economy (relative unemployment, especially youth unemployment) in the cities along rivers or generally in humid areas, would help a lot.

Regulating semi-arid land use might be feasible through nature reservations, but I don't recall any impressive big game in the area, so this would at least initially look quite unconvincing.

One might probably outlaw certain kinds of livestock, too (the ones which damage vegetation the most. Goats are such problematic livestock elsewhere, but I'm not sure which livestock is being used in the region.)

Is there any government in that area capable of carrying out the actions emphasized by bold type above? Any external authority with the capacity and interest? It's all a very nice idea, but short of putting the whole region under some external authority with the capacity to take on these actions, which we all know is not going to happen, it seems too far outside the confines of practical reality to warrant discussion.