Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has said the army will use new tactics to crush a Shiite rebellion in the north of the country, the official Saba news agency reported on Thursday. 'I am sure that we will manage, in the weeks to come, to clean up these regions,' the news agency quoted Saleh as saying of rebel strongholds in the rugged Saada region on the Saudi border. 'We have the experience,' Saleh told soldiers on Wednesday as they prepared to be sent to the battlefront, where Zaidi rebels, also known as Huthis, have been locked in fierce fighting with government troops. 'I am sure we will bring an end to this sedition,' said Saleh, a Zaidi himself. 'But nevertheless we will change our tactics and our military strategies in order to root out the rebels and put a final end to their criminal acts.' There have been no reliable casualty figures since Yemen launched 'Operation Scorched Earth' against the rebels more than two weeks ago, but the rebels say that dozens of civilians have been killed. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said last week that around 35,000 people have been displaced by the fighting. An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Zaidis are a minority in mainly Sunni Yemen but form the majority community in the north and want to overthrow the imamate overthrown in a 1962 coup. Thousands of people have been killed since the conflict first erupted in 2004. A committee of military commanders also ruled out any let-up in the fighting unless the Zaidi Shiite rebels agree to ceasefire conditions set by the authorities earlier this month. 'The commission regrets the rebels' rejection of the call to peace and reaffirms that the army and security forces will continue to track the terrorists,' said a statement on the defence ministry newspaper's sep26.net website. The rebels dismissed the government's truce offer as not serious, recalling that a Qatari-brokered peace deal reached in June 2007 had never been implemented. Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kurbi meanwhile rejected any new foreign mediation to resolve the conflict. 'The government has proposed a six-point plan to end the war and establish the peace and if these groups accept them there would be no need for any external intervention,' he told sep26.net. Kurbi also said that around 130,000 people have been displaced by the fighting since it first broke out in 2004 and said that the government was willing to cooperate with humanitarian groups to help them. A military spokesman meanwhile said that fighter jets had destroyed vehicles transporting weapons to the rebels on Wednesday, Saba reported. 