Yemen remains the most unpredictable of Arab lands, a country with a more tortuous recent history almost any other state in the Arab World. But after ten years of on-off fighting, the last thing I would have predicted was that the Huthi movement would be able to effectively conquer Yemen from their mountain stronghold in Sa'dah province, writes Charlie Pratt. The Huthi, nominally a Shi'a Zaydi revivalist movement, but effectively a coalition of disaffected and marginalized tribes from Sa'dah linked to the al-Huthi family, are organised and effective, but the door they pushed it is an open one; their advance exposing the state machinery of Yemen for the sham it was, and is, and revealing much grimmer prospects for the future than previously anticipated.

The bad news stories pour out of Yemen. Military action against al-Qa'ida in the South of the country makes slow, painful progress in an area of the country aflame with separatist zeal and anger at the North. Sana'a witness clashes between troops loyal to the vengeful former President 'Ali 'Abdallah Salih, unseated by diktat of the Gulf Cooperation Council, and those of the incumbent. And, more than ever, Yemen seems capable of splitting back into the forms it once inhabited; either a separate North and South Yemen or a patchwork of tiny tribal fiefdoms notionally unified as Yemen. But Charlie Pratt reports a quiet optimism.