Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has accused rebels from the Zaidi minority who were engaged in fierce fighting with government forces in the country's northwest of seeking to overthrow his republican regime. "These militias sought to rebel against the republican regime and turn the clock back," he said on Saturday of the two rounds of battles in Saada Province last summer and in March-April this year, according to the official Saba news agency. "Documents proved that there was [an attempt] to topple the republican regime and return the regime to what it was in the past, which our people will not accept at all," he said. The Zaidis are a Shiite sect dominant in northwestern Yemen but in the minority in the mainly Sunni country. The rebels reject as illegitimate the regime which seized power in a 1962 coup, overthrowing the Zaidi imamate.Saleh, who was speaking to members of Parliament and a consultative council, did not mention the "Faithful Youth" movement of slain radical preacher Hussein Badreddine al-Houthi, who was killed by the army last September after leading a nearly three-month uprising in Saada Province in which more than 400 people were killed. He said those involved in the rebellion were "militias," the "armed wing of the Al-Haq and Union of Popular Forces parties," a reference to two Zaidi-led Islamist opposition parties. The Faithful Youth organization was formed in 1997 as a breakaway from Al-Haq.