Peshawar, Pakistan ? U.S. forces joined Pakistani paramilitary troops in searching an Islamic school near the Afghan border for adherents of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, tribal elders and Muslim clerics said Saturday.

Both U.S. and Pakistani officials have recently said that a small U.S. force is operating in the wild tribal region, but the comments were the first reliable reports of American troops by people in the area.

“The Pakistani forces with the help of American soldiers on Friday stormed a religious school at Darpa Khel to search for al-Qaida men,” said Maulvi Abdul Hafeez, a prominent cleric in Mir Ali, about 200 miles southwest of Peshawar. “We condemn this Pakistan-U.S. operation.”

The building was empty and no arrests were made, Hafeez said. The school was set up by prominent Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he added.

Afghan Islamic Press, a private news agency based in Pakistan, reported that about 10 U.S. soldiers and 200 Pakistani paramilitary troops attacked Haqqani’s school at Darpa Khel on Friday evening.

At MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., Commander Frank Merriman, a spokesman at the Central Command headquarters of Gen. Tommy Franks, said “We really can’t confirm ongoing operations.” He would not comment further.

The Bush administration sees the entry of U.S. personnel into the tribal regions as the beginning of a dangerous but necessary phase in the hunt for al-Qaida fighters who have taken refuge outside Afghanistan.

Tribal areas lie west of the capital, Islamabad, just inside the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan’s Paktia and Paktika provinces. They are traditional strongholds for bin Laden, the Saudi-born fugitive who heads al-Qaida.

U.S. officials say Haqqani, the Taliban’s former minister of frontier affairs, has been supporting efforts by al-Qaida and Taliban fighters intent on regrouping.

Before the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Haqqani ruled much of Paktia province and consented to bin Laden’s construction of training camps there.

Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has defied strong anti-American sentiment among Pakistanis and supported Bush in the anti-terrorism campaign. The presence of U.S. ground forces chasing al-Qaida inside Pakistan adds new fuel to opponents of Musharraf.

The Pakistani army treads lightly in the tribal regions and has been unable to police its border alone.

Hafeez said the tribal elders and religious leaders were appealing to the Pakistani government to refrain from conducting more operations, asserting that neither al-Qaida nor Taliban members are hiding there.

“In order to prevent these kind of raids in future we have started consulting other tribal elders and clerics. We will not let American forces operate in our areas,” Hafeez told The Associated Press by phone on Saturday.