REUTERS - No sooner had Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi announced his resignation than his country's tenuous political fabric began to disintegrate.
Provinces across a nation barely held together by a complex web of tribal and religious alliances said they would no longer take military commands from Sanaa after the Iranian-allied Shi'ite Houthi group besieged Hadi's home and palace this week.
The emerging fragmentation of the Arabian Peninsula country has sparked fears of the "Somalization" of a state which is home to a revitalized al-Qaida insurgency as well as a neighbor to top oil exporter Saudi Arabia.
For Washington, Yemen's splintering would make it hard to carry out a counter-terrorism strategy against al-Qaida plotters who have targeted it and its ally Saudi Arabia and claimed responsibility for the January 7 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris.
Through Hadi, a supporter of U.S. drone strikes on al-Qaida, Yemen was a top U.S. ally in the Washington's fight against islamist militancy.
For Yemen's neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia, the rise of the Houthis resembles yet another fallen domino in capitals where allies of regional rival Iran have risen to power - including Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad.
The Houthi fighters, a guerrilla force drawn from a Shi'ite minority that ruled a thousand-year kingdom in Yemen's highlands until 1962, first seized the capital Sanaa in September.
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