PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN - Attackers fired a rocket early Wednesday at the building where U.S. forces searching for al-Qaida members in Pakistan's wild tribal region were sleeping, a local Pakistani official said. The rocket missed and no one was injured. <br>
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The rocket was fired about 3 a.m. at a vocational training institute in Miranshah, about 15 kilometers from the Afghanistan border in rugged northwestern Pakistan, an official in Miranshah said on condition of anonymity. <br>
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Local people said the attackers aimed at the institute but hit an adjacent college building, damaging a wall and windows. No one was hurt because the building was empty, the official said. <br>
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It was not known who fired the rocket, but an investigation has been opened, he said. <br>
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The number of U.S. soldiers staying in the building was also unknown. <br>
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Both U.S. and Pakistani officials have confirmed that a small U.S. force is operating with Pakistani troops in the wild tribal region, which borders Afghanistan. The area is the traditional stronghold for Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born fugitive who heads al-Qaida. <br>
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The Pakistani army treads lightly in the tribal regions, whose deeply conservative and fiercely independent inhabitants swear little allegiance to anyone but their tribal elders and laws laid out by tradition and strict adherence to the tenets of Islam. <br>
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A raid last weekend on a religious school resulted in no arrests, but enraged local religious leaders, who condemned the presence of Americans as an insult to their sacred sites. <br>
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``We will not let American forces operate in our areas,'' Maulvi Abdul Hafeez, a prominent cleric in Mir Ali, about 200 miles southwest of Peshawar, told The Associated Press by phone on Saturday.
