Thread by @peterjsalisbury

For the past several weeks we've been hearing two rival narratives on #Yemen: from watchers abroad, that the fighting has stalemated. From contacts on the ground, that a large-scale escalation is imminent. It’s now clear that escalation it is.. Some thoughts.

#THREAD

The stalemate narrative: Put simply, for many not watching Yemen day-to-day, the war appears to have reached a moment of inertia because the Huthis have not entered Marib City, and international media attention has waned. But in fact, in our tracking we've seen several trends...

1) Huthi consolidation in al-Bayda governorate; and
2) Gradual Huthi expansion in western and southern Marib. Plus…
3) Mounting STC-government tensions amid economic/service collapse in the south, and Huthi/others' efforts to exploit and catalyse these differences.

Over the past week, those trends have coalesced. The Huthis have more or less consolidated control in al-Bayda and used it as a launching point for pushes into Shabwa, Abyan and Marib. They appear to be targeting key road networks and interchanges linking the three governorates

... and connecting key military sites within the different governorates. If successful, this does several things. It makes resupplying Marib with fighters, materiel and food much harder, basically limiting the city to one road in and out.

It would also, similarly, isolate government-aligned forces in the eastern two thirds of Abyan governorate, who are there to secure the governorate against both the Huthis and STC fighters to the west.

The Huthi push into Abyan and Shabwa has also led to a ratcheting up of STC rhetoric and government-STC tensions, which in both cases may also be designed to divert/reroute attention from protests in Aden and other southern cities over services.

This strategy seems to be designed to isolate, divide, demoralize and conquer the key anti-Huthi forces on the ground. It is accompanied by a public communications campaign and intensive private outreach by Huthi officials.

Will it succeed? I don’t know. But it has clearly served at leat part of its purpose in that it has driven new, bigger wedges between the constituent parts of the anti-Huthi bloc. And it is clear that the stalemate narrative is well behind the curve.